Cloud Robotics: Slam And Autonomous Exploration On Paas

Robots are moving out of factories, service robotics is bringing them to our homes, work environments, cities, and outdoors. While the Robot Operating System (ROS) is promising to open the world of robotics to developers, a proper platform and ecosystem supporting robotic applications development is still missing. This work presents an example of cloud robotics application in which cloud computing is not just complementing limited robot capabilities, but is leveraged to provide a development and operations environment supporting the complete life-cycle of a robotics-enabled application. We relate on our experience building cloud robotics applications spanning heterogeneous hardware (i.e., robots and cloud servers) through a use case scenario.