MyBot: Cloud-Based Service Robot using Service-Oriented Architecture

This paper is an extended version of the conference paper presented in IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC 2016).This paper presents a viable solution for the development of service robots by leveraging cloud and Web services technologies, modular software architecture design, and Robot Operating System (ROS). The contributions of this paper are two- folded (1) Design of ROS Web services to provide new abstract interfaces to service robots that makes easier the interaction with and the development of service robots applications, and (2) Integration of the service robot to the cloud using the ROSLink protocol. We demonstrate through real-world implementation on the MyBot robot the effectiveness of these software abstraction layers in developing applications for service robots through the Internet and the cloud, and in accessing them through Internet. We believe that this work represents an important step towards a more popular use of service robots.