Development of IoT/Cloud Integration Frameworks for Autonomous Networked Robots (ANR)

ANR are ubiquitous systems featured by the interaction of multirobots and WSNs, where data is exchanged between these systems leading to wider coverage and perception. Also, the integration of ANR systems with IoT/cloud platform increases their efficiency of the ANR system through expanded data storage for remote data analytics and cloud-based action triggering on their operational environments. This paper presents the development of IoT/cloud integration frameworks supporting ANR functionalities. The developed framework constitutes a base station (BS) IoT/cloud and sensor node (SN) IoT/cloud framework. The BS framework involves the use of IoT gateways to connect to IoT/cloud platforms while in the SN framework connects the sensor node IoTs to the IoT/cloud platform. In the BS framework, the sensor nodes communicate their data to the BS IoT gateway. The BS IoT gateway then communicates the data to the local BS visualization interface and to IoT/cloud platform for cloud visualization and analytics. For the SN IoT/cloud framework, the sensor nodes communicate the data directly to the local BS visualization interface and IoT/cloud platforms without the need for the IoT gateway. The BS framework was then developed and simulated for a large operational environment ANR monitoring application. The developed BS framework involved static and dynamic nodes with a fuzzy logic-based event classification system, a two-tier network connecting the sensor nodes, a local graphical user interface (GUI) for sensor node data visualization and ThingSpeak cloud visualization and analytics. The simulation results showed concurrent interaction and an effective exchange of data among the system components.