Relieving Robots From Their Burdens: The Cloud Agent Concept

The consumer robotics concept has already invaded our everyday lives; however two major drawbacks have become apparent both for the roboticists and the consumers. The first is that these robots are pre-programmed to perform specific tasks and usually their software is proprietary, thus not open to "interventions". The second is that even if their software is open source, low-cost robots usually lack sufficient resources such as CPU power or memory capabilities, thus forbidding advanced algorithms to be executed in-robot. Within the context of RAPP (Robotic Applications for Delivering Smart User Empowering Applications) we treat robots as platforms, where applications can be downloaded and automatically deployed. Furthermore, we propose and implement a novel multi-agent architecture, empowering robots to offload computations in entities denoted as Cloud Agents. This paper discusses the respective architecture in detail.