Design of a Robot Cloud Center

Service-oriented architecture and cloud computing have become the prevalent computing paradigm. In this paradigm, computing resources can be accessed like other utility services available in today\´s society. In the meantime, robotics applications are joining the trend. More and more robot applications are shifting from manufacture to non-manufacture and service industries. However, for the on-demand supply of the large-scale heterogeneous robots, It is still a problem have not yet been studied, including the fundamental management and efficiency issues in using of these resources. In this paper, we design a framework of "Robot Cloud Center" (RCC) following the general cloud computing paradigm to address the current limitations in capacity and versatility of robotic applications. In this framework, a robot can be provided as a service just like a public utility service so that everyone can access the powerful robotic services easily, efficiently, and cheaply. Based on a given scenario, a robot scheduling algorithm in RCC is proposed to take advantage of the heterogeneous robot resources to meet the end user\´s requirement with the minimum cost.