Cloudroid: A Cloud Framework for Transparent and QoS-Aware Robotic Computation Outsourcing

Many robotic tasks require heavy computation, which can easily exceed the robot's onboard computer capability. A promising solution to address this challenge is outsourcing thecomputation to the cloud. However, exploiting the potential ofcloud resources in robotic software is difficult, because it in-volves complex code modification and extensive (re)configurationprocedures. Moreover, quality of service (QoS) such as timeliness, which is critical to robot's behavior, have to be considered. Inthis paper, we propose a transparent and QoS-aware softwareframework called Cloudroid for cloud robotic applications. Thisframework supports direct deployment of existing robotic soft-ware packages to the cloud, transparently transforming theminto Internet-accessible cloud services. And with the automati-cally generated service stubs, robotic applications can outsourcetheir computation to the cloud without any code modification. Furthermore, the robot and the cloud can cooperate to maintainthe specific QoS property such as request response time, evenin a highly dynamic and resource-competitive environment. Weevaluated Cloudroid based on a group of typical robotic scenariosand a set of software packages widely adopted in real-worldrobot practices. Results show that robots capability can beenhanced significantly without code modification and specific QoSobjectives can be guaranteed. In certain tasks, the "cloud + robot" setup shows improved performance in orders of magnitudecompared with the robot native setup.