Real-time cloud robotics in practical smart city applications

Smart mobile devices are one of the main factors of realizing the smart city of tomorrow. To this aim, in this paper, we investigate utilizing cloud robotics as a practical processing platform for making the existing inexpensive mobile devices such as robots smarter and collaborative. Smart cities with the scattered massive number of sensors would need complicated infrastructure to connect and process large quantities of data. Cloud robotics has emerged as an efficient computing means in intensive data processing applications. Hence, we introduce C2RO cloud robotics platform that uses real-time stream processing technology to virtually connect the energy-efficient and low-cost city mobile devices or sensors. Moreover, to mitigate the effects of latency, we propose the hybrid cloud robotics computation model used in C2RO cloud robotics platform as a processing model employing both edge and cloud computing technologies in robotics. We demonstrate the superiority of C2RO platform through practical experiments and show that our proposed computational model provides significant optimization in the latency and processing rate, and achieves the real-time target of a high-profile urban project.