Microservice-based cloud robotics system for intelligent space

Cloud robotics (CR) is a red-hot branch of the burgeoning field of service robots that is centered on the benefits of integrating infrastructure and shared services via a cloud computing environment. Although it extends the computation power and information sharing capabilities of the network robots, the development and operations (DevOps) of the CR system are currently limited for enterprise-scale projects due to the heavy framework. In fact, current developed CR systems are typical distributed monomer architectures followed by a “top-down” design. As the scale of the applications gets larger, the operation and maintenance of CR systems will become a very difficult task. In this paper, a new architecture for a microservice-based cloud robotics system in intelligent space is proposed to solve the present dilemma. To enable this, we design a service management architecture based on a microservice to provide a highly efficient and flexible development/deployment mechanism. The container technology based on the docker engine is then used to functionally decompose the application into a set of collaborating services to ensure the software design methods, based on microservice, easy for implementation. Finally, a real experiment on SLAM (Simulation localization and mapping) in an intelligent space is implemented to verify the proposed architecture. Compared with traditional monomer architectures, the results show that the proposed framework is more productive, flexible and cost effective.