Towards a Distributed Computation Offloading Architecture for Cloud Robotics

Cloud robotics is incessantly gaining ground, especially with the rapid expansion of wireless networks and Internet resources. In particular, computation offloading is emerging as a new trend, enabling robots with more powerful computation resources. It helps them to overcome the hardware and software limitations by leveraging parallel computing capabilities and the availability of large amounts of resources in the cloud. However, the performance gain of computation offloading in cloud robotics is still an ongoing research problem because of the conflicting factors that affect the performance. In this paper, we investigate this issue and we design a distributed cloud robotic architecture for computation offloading based on Kafka middleware as messaging broker. We experimentally validated our solution and tested its performance using image processing algorithms. Experimental results show a significant reduction in robot CPU load, as expected, with an increase in robot communication delays.