A Study of Robotic Cooperation in Cloud Robotics: Architecture and Challenges

Networked robotics involves a collection of robots working together to perform complex tasks, such as search and rescue task in disaster management. Because such tasks are beyond the capacity of a single powerful robot, networked robotics has been widely researched. However, the modes of cooperation in traditional networked robotics have been restricted by the inherent physical constraint that all computations are performed in the robotic network, with knowledge sharing being limited to the collective storage in the network. Cloud robotics, which allows robots to benefit from the rich storage, computation, and communication resources of modern data centers, is widely accepted as a promising approach to efficient robot cooperation in applications, such as disaster management. In this paper, we study robotic cooperation in cloud robotics. We first give a conceptual view of the nature of this cooperation. We then propose three novel robotic cooperation frameworks for cloud robotics: robotic knowledge sharing cooperation, robotic physical-task cooperation, and robotic computation task cooperation. Finally, we identify several critical challenges, and illustrate the potential benefits of robotic cooperation in cloud robotics.