What Is Cloud Robotics?
October 3, 2013
Grazed from Ed Tech Magazine. Author: David Weldon.
From government to finance to education, it seems that everyone wants to work in the cloud these days — even robots. As cloud computing captures the public imagination, it also has become the latest area of serious study in robotics on numerous college campuses, including Philadelphia’s Drexel University and the University of Minnesota.
James Kuffner, a research scientist at Google, purportedly coined the term "cloud robotics" in 2010 to describe "a new approach to robotics that takes advantage of the Internet as a resource for massively parallel computation and sharing of vast data resources," writes the University of California, Berkeley’s Ken Goldberg…
The goals, primarily, are twofold: Use cloud-based applications for data processing and storage capability, freeing up a robot from having to lug all that technology around with it, and enable robots to communicate and share data among themselves. Among those interested in the emerging field is M. Ani Hsieh, an assistant professor in the mechanical engineering and mechanics department at Drexel University, and the head of Drexel’s robotics program. Hsieh recently co-hosted a National Science Foundation and U.S. Army Research Laboratory–sponsored workshop on cloud robotics, along with Ibrahim Volkan Isler, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. Much of Hsieh’s research focuses on large-scale sampling of oceans to predict currents, and how changes in the ocean impact weather. The group hopes to eventually take advantage of cloud robotics in that research, she says…
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