Research And Implementation On Software Platform Supporting Cloud Robotics

With the expansion of the application areas,robots need complex algorithm,big data and rich knowledge.However,constrained by manufacturing cost and hardware platform,the onboard resources of single robots are very limited.Under this circumstance,cloud robotics attracts researchers and related engineers.Cloud computing can offer the robots high performance computing resources,and the big data stored on cloud platform can enhance significantly autonomy and collaborative capacity of robots.With the development of cloud robotics,there appears the challenge about how to construct various robotic tasks oriented cloud services,and build the cloud robotic software ecological chain.In this process,a Platform as a Service level cloud software platform is essential.This platform should provide the ability of reusing the achievements of robotics(like a large number of software packages based on ROS,which has been the de facto standard of robotic software),and support that multi robots can access the cloud services on demand.Focus on this requirement,This paper focus on the following three aspects of research:(1)The structure of a cloud platform supporting deployment of ROS packages.This paper proposes a structure based on Docker and ROS of common cloud platform using ROS software packages as the model of applications,protocol transition and on-demand instantiation to encapsulate the applications,and Docker to implement the resource isolation,which supports rapid deployment of ROS packages,and offer ROS applications to robots as cloud services.(2)The mechanism of service encapsulation of ROS applications.This paper offers a mechanism of service encapsulation of ROS applications by transformation between ROS message and JSON message and related WebSocket-based communication to make ROS suitable for internet environment.(3)The mechanism of resource isolation and scheduling.This paper research the resource isolation and scheduling mechanism based on container to ensure the service quality when multi robots require services simultaneously.Based on these,this paper implements a prototype system and do some experiments to prove the usability of the cloud platform,acceleration of robotic task and support to multi robots scenario.