Robot as a Service in Cloud Computing

Service-oriented architecture and cloud computing are becoming a dominant computing paradigm, as all major computing companies are supporting this paradigm and more and more organizations are adopting this paradigm. Robotics and service-oriented robotics computing start to joint this new paradigm in the past five years and are now ready to participate in large scale. This paper reports our research on service-oriented robotics computing and our design, implementation, and evaluation of Robot as a Service (RaaS) unit. To fully qualify the RaaS as a cloud computing unit, we have kept our design to comply with the common service standards, development platforms, and execution infrastructure. We also keep the source code open and allow the community to configure the RaaS following the Web 2.0 principles of participation. Developers can add, remove, and modify the RaaS of their own. For this purpose, we have implemented our RaaS on Windows and Linux operating systems running on Atom and Core 2 Duo architectures. RaaS supports programming languages commonly used for service-oriented computing such as Java and C#. Special efforts have been made to support Microsoft Visual Programming Language (VPL) for graphic composition. We are working with high schools to use RaaS and VPL in robotics camps and robotics competitions.