Cloud, Fog, and Dew Robotics: architectures for next generation applications

Robots are rapidly moving from isolated to connected systems, with more and more operations offloaded to external systems. Cloud Robotics has indeed become a new important trend in this research field. In this paper we advocate the necessity to move a step forward in this direction considering the real needs of new generation robotics systems. Such systems have indeed very peculiar requirements with respect to the traditional applications that have progressively exploited Cloud infrastructures. Cloud is surely an important addition, but robots still require important computations to be performed closer to or onto them for, e.g., critical decisions involving human interaction. This motivates our work in which we delve into the possible alternatives to pure Cloud Robotics, considering Fog-and Dew-computing as better suited to next generation applications. We describe these complementary but alternative architectures and how they match the requirements of robotics applications. We identify Dew Robotics as the most promising architecture and motivate our choice. We present three use cases we have been working on, to better illustrate our proposal. We finally draw some conclusions for this emerging yet important research field.

机器人正迅速从孤立系统向互联系统转变，越来越多的操作被转移到外部系统。云机器人技术确实已成为该研究领域的一个重要新趋势。在本文中，考虑到新一代机器人系统的实际需求，我们主张有必要朝着这个方向更进一步。与逐渐利用云基础设施的传统应用相比，此类系统确实有非常特殊的要求。云无疑是一项重要的补充，但机器人仍然需要在更靠近自身的位置或自身上进行重要的计算，例如涉及人机交互的关键决策。这激发了我们的工作，在其中我们深入研究了纯云机器人技术的可能替代方案，认为雾计算和露计算更适合下一代应用。我们描述了这些互补但可替代的架构以及它们如何满足机器人应用的要求。我们确定露机器人技术是最有前途的架构并阐述我们选择的理由。我们介绍了我们一直在研究的三个用例，以更好地说明我们的提议。最后，我们对这个新兴且重要的研究领域得出了一些结论。