A cloud computing approach to complex robot vision tasks using smart camera systems

In this paper we show our work on enabling service robot systems to distribute parts of the image processing functions to different off-board computer systems in the working environment of the robot. Thus complex algorithms can be carried out on high performance systems circumventing the restrictions considering space and power consumption that a mobile platform imposes. As high resolution cameras provide a huge amount of image data and the bandwidth of a wireless network connection is strongly limited, we are using intelligent camera systems on the mobile robot platform to execute parts of the image processing functions directly on the robot. This way only preprocessed image information will be transmitted instead of raw image data. We are using a flexible modular software framework that allows us to split image processing tasks into a pipeline of modular functions that can run on different systems. We show how our approach can be used to enable a service robot system to speed up high resolution SIFT-based object detection.