ROS-based Solution for Robotic Services in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Robot Operating System (ROS) is becoming a widely-used environment for devel- oping robot software systems. It provides unique features such as message-passing between processes and code reuse between robots. The new trend in ROS-based robotic systems is facing the development and delivery of effective services by com- bining the advantages of both cloud robotics and web services. Cloud robotics is the way that allows robots to overcome their limitations of pro- cessing and knowledge by boosting computational and cognitive capabilities. On the other hand, as an implementation of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), web Services allow mainly different ROS codes to be discovered over the internet for their reuse. However, the characterization, description, and discovery of the ROS service capability for the offered robotic functionality are still issues that are not fully ad- dressed. In this context, we focus in this thesis on developing an architecture for roboti software provisioning to both software developers and robots by exploiting the op- portunities of ROS, web services, and cloud robotics. We propose a complete SOA approach for cloud robotics, in which ROS-based robotic tasks are defined as web services. The approach focuses on defining the service cycle process of describing, discovering, and selecting services. Two characterizations for ROS web services are proposed. The service characterizations describe the semantic representation of the robot task from ROS itself. In each case, we present a strategy that allows users todiscover the relevant robotic service that can match their queries and robots.