A Software Stack for Composable Cloud Robotics System

Yuan Xu, Tianwei Zhang, Sa Wang, Yungang Bao

Abstract: Modern cloud robotic applications face new challenges in managing today’s highly distributed and heterogeneous environment. For example, the application programmers must make numerous systematical decisions between the local robot and the cloud server, such as computation deployment, data sharing and function integration. In this paper, we propose RobotCenter, a composable cloud robotics operating system for developing and deploying robotics applications. RobotCenter provides three key functionalities: runtime management, data management and programming abstraction. With these functionalities, RobotCenter enables application programmers to easily develop powerful and diverse robotics applications. Meanwhile, it can efficiently execute these applications with high performance and low energy consumption. We implement a prototype of the design above and use an example of AGV/UAV cooperative transport application to illustrate the feasibility of RobotCenter. In the experiment, we reduce the total energy consumption and mission completion time up to 41.2% and 51.5%, respectively.