Managing a fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) using cloud robotics platform

In this paper, we provide details of managing a fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) using Rapyuta Cloud Robotics Platform. While the robots are themselves completely autonomous in its motion and obstacle avoidance capability, the target destination for each robot is provided by a global planner which itself may receive goals from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The global planner and the ground vehicles (robots) constitute a multi agent system (MAS) which communicate with each other over a wireless network. The complexities involved, and the corresponding benefits of implementing such a cloud based system is explained by comparing with two other implementations based on the standard distributed computing and communication framework of Robot Operating System (ROS). The working of the complete system is demonstrated through a real world experiment with physical robots in a laboratory setting. Through these implementations, the limitations of the current cloud framework is identified and critical suggestions are made for its improvement which, in turn, forms the future direction for this work.