Connected Robotics Cloud Robotics, Robotics as a Service and Internet-of-Things João Pedro Dias, ProDEI Researcher @ INESC TEC 

Outline • Introduction • Background & State of the Art • Application Scenarios • Research: Opportunities & Challenges • Conclusions 

Introduction  What if robotics was not limited by on-board memory, computing power or, even, programming?  Wireless networks enabled the use of external systems to go beyond those limitations, having robots connected between them, off-board systems and the Internet.  Furthermore, the advent of Cloud Computing improved the possibilities of computing outside of the contained on-board systems, using Internet-connected Services like storage and processing.  So, is Cloud Robotics just another name for Skynet? CompCon 2013 - Jessica Lethbridge - Is Cloud Robotics just another name for Skynet?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vepJL5psME 

Background & State of the Art: Concepts • Cloud Robotics: A robotics field that invokes cloud technologies (cloud computing, cloud storage) in order to get converged infrastructure and shared services for robotics.1 • Robotics as a Service (RaaS): A cloud computing component/unit that facilitates the seamless integration of robot and embedded devices into Web and cloud computing environment.2 • Internet-of-Things (IoT): The network of physical devices, vehicles, and other items embedded with electronics (things), software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity (Internet) which enable these objects to collect and exchange data.3 1. Cloud Robotics and Automation, http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/cloud-robotics/ 2. Y. Chen, Z. Du and M. García-Acosta, "Robot as a Service in Cloud Computing," 2010 Fifth IEEE International Symposium on Service Oriented System Engineering, Nanjing, 2010, pp. 151-158. 3. M. Díaz, C. Martín, and B. Rubio, “State-of-the-art, challenges, and open issues in the integration of Internet of things and cloud computing”, J. Netw. Comput. Appl., vol. 67, pp. 99–117, 2016. 

Application Scenarios: RoboEarth • RoboEarth works as a network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other and a cloud for outsourcing heavy computation tasks. • As example, a robot can be programmed with a basic skill set (like moving and mapping), but when need to get more information about the world around, it connects to the Internet and can get information about relevant objects location (e.g. Bluetooth beacons location). It can also learn how to serve a drink for example using a Serve-a-Drink Action Recipe. 1. M. Waibel et al., "RoboEarth," in IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 69-82, June 2011. 2. RoboEarth – A World Wide Web for Robots, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5ZRxbo0pSQ&start=76 

Application Scenarios: Valkyrie  Valkyrie is NASA's first bipedal humanoid robot, designed for being capable of operating in degraded or damaged human-engineered environments. Valkyrie is also one of the first steps towards robots able to help humans in extraterrestrial planetary settings.  Due to the high-dimensional number of Degrees-of-Freedom, the humanoid requires the existence of a Supervisory Control which allows the existence of a shared autonomy between the operator and the robot itself. 1. Radford, Nicolaus A., et al. "Valkyrie: NASA's first bipedal humanoid robot." Journal of Field Robotics 32.3 (2015): 397-419. 

Application Scenarios: Valkyrie 1. Interactive Whole-body IK on the NASA Valkyrie Robot, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKyVkTAUqiM 

Application Scenarios: IBM Watson Engagement Advisor • “Connie” – the first Watson-enabled robot concierge in the hospitality industry.1 • Allows a natural language interaction with the costumer (e.g. Q&A), carrying the costumer trough the business process reacting properly to the costumer emotional states. • Robot programming SDK is available, providing access to the IBM Watson cloud platform, with advanced machine learning services. 1. Watson APIs - Hilton and IBM pilot “Connie,” The world’s first Watson-enabled hotel concierge robot, https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2016/03/watson-connie/ 

Application Scenarios: IBM Watson Engagement Advisor IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, https://youtu.be/o-HaP4mpW78?t=1m7s 

Research: Opportunities & Challenges • Big Data: robots access to libraries of images, maps, paths, and descriptive data. Also, data-mining the history of all cloud-enabled robots; • Cloud Computing: access to parallel grid computing on demand for statistical analysis, learning, and motion planning, offloading heavy computing; • Collective Robot Learning: robots sharing trajectories, control policies, and outcomes, providing a shared knowledge database; • Human Computation: use of crowdsourcing to tap human skills in order to analyse images and video, classification, learning, and error recovery. 1. Kehoe, B., Patil, S., Abbeel, P., & Goldberg, K. (2015). A survey of research on cloud robotics and automation. IEEE Transactions on automation science and engineering, 12(2), 398-409. 

Research: Opportunities & Challenges • Connected robots are an opportunity to organize and unify information about the world in a format usable by robots; • Opens an opportunity for cheaper, lighter, easier-to-maintain hardware and longer battery life; • Less need for software pushes/updates (reducing the programming needed on- board); • Skill/Behavior Database: reusable library of “skills” or behaviors that map to perceived task requirements/complex situations (like an App Store for robots). 1. James J. Kuffner. Cloud-Enabled Robots. In IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots ,Nashville, TN, 2010. 

Research: Opportunities & Challenges • Connectivity-dependency: Connected robots can be dependent on Internet connectivity, and, if the network connection has a disruption, the robot can become inactive/disabled.  Latency is one of the open-issues with most impact. • Security & Privacy: If the robots are connected to the Internet, security and privacy problems may arise (e.g. ransomware).  Access Control, Data Leakage, Quality of Service Disruption,... 1. Wan, Jiafu, et al. "Cloud robotics: Current status and open issues." IEEE Access 4 (2016): 2797-2807. 

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Conclusions • Cloud Robotics, Robotics-as-a-Service and Internet-of-Things are three concepts that are linked together towards connected robotics. • Some projects with the use of this concepts have already been implemented and some are already in use (or production phases). • There are a lot of open issues and research opportunities in the area of connected robotics that must be resolved in order to widespread the use of these techniques in everyday solutions. 

So, is Cloud Robotics just another name for Skynet? Maybe, just not yet. SkyNet, https://xkcd.com/1046/ 

Thank you! João Pedro Dias, ProDEI Researcher @ INESC TEC [email protected]