Towards the deployment of cloud robotics at factory shop floors: A prototype for smart material handling

The evolution of industries and their needs towards the implementation of Industry 4.0 based systems has brought both new technological challenges and opportunities. This article proposes the adoption and deployment of cloud robotics at factories to enhance the control and monitoring of processes, such as handling materials multiple assemblies in single cells. The ultimate research objective of this research is the offloading computation and integrating cloud robotics into an industrial scenario. However, the investigation of state of the art techniques, tools and technologies, and the development of functional prototypes is beforehand required. Then, this article presents a small-scale system as a prototype that employs the Google cloud vision API as a resource that, in turn, is used by networked agents for supporting the decision-making in the process of handling material commodities at factory shop floor. The overall concept as well as the interaction between the main actors of the prototype is detailed. Finally, further research directions are discussed.