Cloud Robotics will make robots a lot lighter, cheaper, and smarter than the conventional ones.
Every time we come across an unknown concept or an image or a word, we quickly search for it on google and instantly get loads of answers on that matter. If robots could do the same, things will be so much easier. For conventional robots, every task like moving a foot, grasping an object, recognizing a face, requires a significant amount of processing and preprogrammed information. So, installing any new programming in them, for new knowledge takes a lot of time and effort. This is why several research groups are exploring the idea of robots that rely on cloud-computing infrastructure to access vast amounts of processing power and data. This approach, which some are calling “cloud robotics,” would allow robots to offload compute-intensive tasks like image processing and voice recognition and even download new skills instantly.
The Concept of Cloud Robotics
The idea of cloud robotics is to attach the robot to an external cloud. So, if the robot sees an unknown object, it can instantly send the image to the cloud and receive information and instructions in no time. The term “cloud robotics” is coined by James Juddher, a professor at Carnegie Mellon currently working at Google. He described the possibilities of cloud robotics at the IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots, in Nashville, Tenn., this past December. According to him, embracing the cloud could make robots “lighter, cheaper, and smarter,” He is confident that cloud robotics could offload CPU-heavy tasks to remote servers, relying on smaller and less power-hungry onboard computers. Even more promising, the robots could turn to cloud-based services to expand their capabilities.
The Origin of Cloud Robotics
The idea of connecting a robot to an external computer is not new. Back in the 1990s, Masayuki Inaba at the University of Tokyo explored the concept of a “remote brain,” as he called it, physically separating sensors and motors from high-level “reasoning” software.
Now cloud robotics seeks to push that idea to the next level, exploiting the cheap computing power and ubiquitous Net connectivity available today. Kuffner, who currently works on Google’s self-driving car project, realized that running computing tasks on the cloud is often much more effective than trying to do it locally.
Kuffner explained the Google service known as Google Goggles. If someone snaps a picture of a painting at a museum or a public landmark and Google sends the information about it. Similarly, it can be used in robotics too. A robot would send images of what it is seeing to the cloud, receiving in return detailed information about the environment and objects in it. Using the cloud, the robot could also improve capabilities such as speech recognition, language translation, path planning, and 3D mapping.
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