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CloudThinking as an Intelligent Infrastructure for Mobile Robotics

Aguiar, R. ; Gomes, D.G. ; Barraca, JP ; Lau, N.L.

Wireless Personal Communications Vol. 76, Nº 2, pp. 231 - 244, May, 2014.

ISSN (print): 1572-834X
ISSN (online): 0929-6212

Scimago Journal Ranking: 0,25 (in 2014)

Digital Object Identifier: 10.1007/s11277-014-1687-1

Abstract
Mobile robotics is a transforming field that presents a varying set of challenges. The discussion on the autonomy of (self-powered) robots is not settled, and as the communication infrastructure evolves, centralized concepts become more attractive over distributed concepts. This paper presents the CloudThinking architecture applied to intelligent cloud-based robotic operation. CloudThinking offloads most of complex robotic tasks to a central cloud, which retrieves inputs from the environment as a whole in order to instruct the robots to perform its actions. CloudThinking is a natural approach to the orchestration of multiple specialized robotic systems, defining the best mechanisms for reaching a goal. Furthermore, this architecture provides a set of automatic features which can be useful for application developers. These features can fully exploit novel cloud tools development as it becomes available, providing a time-resilient infrastructure of easy upgrade. The resulting approach has the potential to create a different set of market for robotic application developers.