A Practical Approach of an Internet of Robotic Things Platform

Sammanfattning: This thesis aims to design and develop a platform based on a novel concept - the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) constructed by a robotic platform, an Internet of Things (IoT) platform and cloud computing services. A robotic platform enables hardware abstraction, facilitating the management of input/output between software, mechanical devices  andelectronic systems. The IoT platform is a global network enabling a massive number of devices known as things to communicate with each other and transfer data over the Internet. Cloud computing is a shared pool of scalable hardware usually provisioned as cloud services by third party cloud vendors. The integration of these concepts constitutes the core of the IoRT platform, as a global infrastructure facilitating robots to interconnect over the Internet utilizing common communication technology. Moreover, the pool of cloud resources shared by the connected robots enables scalable storage and processing power. The IoRT platform developed in this study constitutes firstly of the Amazon Web Service (AWS) IoT core serving as the IoT platform. Secondly, it incorporates the Robot Operating system (ROS) as the robotic platform and thirdly the cloud services Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda for data storing and data processing respectively.The platform was evaluated in terms of delays & utilization and visualization capabilities. The platform demonstrates promising result in terms of delays exchanging small packages of data, round-trip delays in order of 50-60ms were obtained between a robot placed in Stockholm and the communication platform AWS IoT placed in Dublin, Ireland. Most of the delay is due to the traveling distance, where a round trip ping between Stockholm and Dublin takes around 50ms. The platforms ability to visualize streaming data from the robots, enables an operator to visualize selected data from any service in the platform over the Internet in near real-time, with round-trip delays in order of 250-300ms where the data propagates through multiple cloud service. In conclusion, this report illustrates the feasibility of merging two major platforms together: ROS and AWS IoT, and moreover, the accessibility to exploit the power and potential enabled by the modern data centers.