Cloud Robotics

Cloud Robotics is the use of remote computing resources to enable computational power, greater memory, collective learning and interconnectivity for robotics applications.

When computational or storage demand exceeds the on-board capacity of a robot, they are loaded onto the cloud, where the datacenters can supplement their limited local resources at large scale resources. Cloud robotics also represent a significant advance for learning robots. While a robot can take 150 hours to learn a task using his personal artificial intelligence (AI) resources, 150 robots can complete tasks in one hour after learning different parts of a task.

With Wi-Fi connections for cloud-based resources, a robot can access the vast library of known objects to identify things in their environment. Object recognition helps in better sorting tasks like sorting, cleaning and using a robot. Dependency on the cloud for resources also means that the robot itself can be simple, thereby attracting expensive calculating power and related cooling and electric power. Due to this offloading, the need for battery in the cloud connected robot is less and it is lightweight and less expensive overall. Cloud robotics are usually used for tasks that do not require real time execution, preserving local resources for applications with a lack of time.

The connection to the cloud eliminates the need for a robot to learn any work from any other connected robot: it can download the necessary information instead of feeling or doing a way to do any work. This mutual affiliation can help robots work more smoothly, automatically synchronizes their tasks.

Google's self-driving cars are a type of cloud-connected robot. Autonomous cars access data from Google Maps and show images stored in the cloud to identify their surroundings. They also gather information about the state of road and traffic and send that information to the cloud.

Another example is Romo, a cheap ($ 150) cloud-connectable robot that runs on a treaded base housing. iPhone provides computational power and its camera, speaker and microphone. The cloud computing factor makes the robot better in recognizing its environment. Romos can be used to play games or used for telepresence, which allows a human operator to be almost present in a remote location.