Cloud-Assisted Remote Control for Aerial Robots: From Theory to Proof-of-Concept Implementation

Cloud robotics has emerged as a promising technology for robotics applications due to its advantages of offloading computationally intensive tasks, facilitating data sharing, and enhancing robot coordination. However, integrating cloud computing with robotics remains a complex challenge due to network latency, security concerns, and the need for efficient resource management. In this work, we present a scalable and intuitive framework for testing cloud and edge robotic systems. The framework consists of two main components enabled by containerized technology: (a) a containerized cloud cluster and (b) the containerized robot simulation environment. The system incorporates two endpoints of a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) tunnel, enabling bidirectional communication between the cloud cluster container and the robot simulation environment, while simulating realistic network conditions. To achieve this, we consider the use case of cloud-assisted remote control for aerial robots, while utilizing Linux-based traffic control to introduce artificial delay and jitter, replicating variable network conditions encountered in practical cloud-robot deployments,