In conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - CLOSER 2016
SCOPE
The connection between the physical world and the virtual world has never been as exciting, accessible, and economically viable as today. Sensors and actors, smart dust, and robots are able to deliver many physical services in several scenarios, including home automation, elderly care, assisted living, logistics and cooperative maintenance.
In isolation, computing capabilities of robots are however limited by embedded CPUs and small on-board storage units. By connecting robots among each other and to cloud computing, cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centered around the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services, two main advantages can be exploited. First, computation can be outsourced to cloud services leveraging an on-demand pay-per-use elastic model. Second, robots can access a plethora of services complementing their capabilities (e.g., speech analysis, object recognition, knowledge sharing), enabling new complex functionalities and supporting learning. Cloud robotics is a natural extension to the Internet of Things (IoT). Where IoT devices will gather information about an environment to help make smarter decisions, cloud robotics will be able to use this information and act on it.
Although there is clear recognition that Cloud access is required to complement robotics computation and enable functionalities needed for robotic tasks (e.g., self-driving cars), it is still unclear how to best support these scenarios.
This workshop deals with a cutting-edge topic spanning all the system and service aspects relevant to supporting modern robotics applications. These naturally include real-time systems, networked, distributed, parallel and embedded computing. Cloud robotics bridges in to the physical world through real time, embedded cyber-physical systems, but builds its computation and complementing services on Cloud infrastructure, big data analytics and all the required supporting technologies (i.e., database, storage, distributed, networked systems).
The workshop aims to:
• bring together researchers working on the topic to exchange ideas, identify challenges, and discuss work directions
• provide an overview of the current status and OpenSource tools available today in this cutting-edge research field
• promote an exchange and fostering collaboration among academic and industrial practitioners
The workshop will provide an open forum for researchers to present their early work, receive feedback, and discuss common challenges and research directions of the field.
Authors are invited to submit original research manuscripts, experience reports and experimental results that demonstrate current research in all areas of cloud robotics.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• Cloud computing, IaaS and PaaS: what is required from cloud technologies to effectively support robotic scenarios? How can best-of-breed Cloud solutions be leveraged? E.g., what is the role of container management systems? How do they interact with ROS?
• Cloud Orchestration: how to automate robotic tasks and resource allocation, synchronization, and management at run-time?
• Scalable computing: How can parallel / grid-based / heterogeneous (e.g., FGPA, GPUs) computing on demand support robotics scenarios?
• Functionality distribution: How should computation be distributed between on board the robot and remotely?
• System architectures: What architectures should be used to provide reliable and scalable cloud-robotics applications?
• Internet of Things: how to interface and leverage IoT devices? What solutions from IoT can be reused in the robotic context?
• Big Data and Knowledge sharing: how to collect, process, share knowledge collected by robots and sensors?
• Communication, security and privacy issues: How can cloud-robotics be robust to moving robots, latency, bandwidth limits, network failures and attacks? What is the role of SDN in cloud robotics?
• Continuous development / integration / deployment in the cloud robotics context