RoboEarth is co-organizing a Special Issue on Cloud Robotics and Automation in the Journal IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE).
Important Dates
- Call for Papers: October 24, 2013
- Deadline for Paper Submission: January 31, 2014
- First Review: May 01, 2014
- Final Review: September 01, 2014
- Publication: January 2015
For more information, have a look at the Cloud Robotics and Automation Call for Papers on the T-ASE website.
We presented RoboEarth at ROSCon 2013. It was really a great developer conference with a lot of technical details, awesome crowd, cool robots, and loads of fun! Our talk also included a live demo of a Roomba doing real-time 3D mapping on the Cloud. Here is the video of our talk:
In the video above, ETH Zurich’s Master student Vladyslav Usenko shows how the RoboEarth Cloud Engine (nickname: Rapyuta) enables a basic, low-cost robot like the iRobot CREATE to perform full 3D mapping in real-time.
For details on the setup and how it works, have a look at an in-depth article about robot mapping in the cloud on Robohub.
The RoboEarth team organized a Cloud Robotics Workshop at the eu Robotics Forum, 19-21 March, Lyon, France. The event was very well received.
For more information, have a look at the first part of the workshop, featuring local and remote talks from Moritz Tenorth (TU Bremen), Alper Aydemir (KTH Stockholm), Séverin Lemaignan (LAAS-CNRS), Ibrahim Volkan Isler (University of Minnesota, remote), M. Ani Hsieh (Drexel University, remote), Guoqiang Hu (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, remote), Matei Ciocarlie and Kaijen Hsiao (Willow Garage, remote), Shuichi Nishio (ATR Japan, remote), and Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley, remote):
Note: Echo is gone after the first 2min.
You may also want to have a look at the archived Cloud Robotics workshop page.
It is our pleasure to announce the first public release of Rapyuta: The RoboEarth Cloud Engine. Rapyuta is an open source cloud robotics platform for robots. It implements a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) framework designed specifically for robotics applications.
Rapyuta helps robots to offload heavy computation by providing secured customizable computing environments in the cloud. Robots can start their own computational environment, launch any computational node uploaded by the developer, and communicate with the launched nodes using the WebSockets protocol.
The above figure shows a simplified overview of the Rapyuta framework: Each robot connected to Rapyuta has a secured computing environment (rectangular boxes) giving them the ability to move their heavy computation into the cloud. Computing environments have a high bandwidth connection to the RoboEarth knowledge repository (stacked circular disks). This allows robots to process data directly inside the computational environment in the cloud without the need for downloading and local processing. Furthermore, computing environments are tightly interconnected with each other. This paves the way for the deployment of robotic teams.
The name Rapyuta is inspired from the movie Tenku no Shiro Rapyuta (English title: Castle in the Sky) by Hayao Miyazaki, where Rapyuta is the castle in the sky inhabited by robots.
To learn more and contribute to this open-source effort, visit: http://rapyuta.org/.
Cloud Robotics Workshop
We'll be organizing a cloud robotics workshop at IROS 2013, Tokyo, Japan.
Funding
Part of the Cognitive Systems and Robotics Initiative from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013.