Communication Infrastructure and Cloud Computing in Robotic Vessel as-a-Service Application

The current trend in robotics is to enhance robustness against uncertainties through complex modern control methods, applied to either single- or multi-agent systems. While indeed these approaches provide noticeable performance improvements, their implementation requires, among others, enclosed environments, where the operator has full access to the control systems of the robot during execution. With constant improvement of the Internet of Things, real-time systems needed different software architectures and communication systems to enable their remote operation, with the same degree of flexibility when operating the systems in-situ. The paradigm shifted towards cloud computing, which moved the computational effort needed for various real-time processing algorithms on the server-sided application and focused on having lightweight interfaces between components, with the exception of the lower-level control loops, which remained within the processing units of the robotic systems. This paper describes the software architecture and communication system for a state-of-the-art service to enable, support and monitor different robotics applications. The case study presents all features of a small-sized but scalable robotics application, having multiple challenges when building a service oriented platform: autonomous robots, over- and underwater long-distance communication, sensor fusion and command and control of multiple users. The goal is to create a centralised cloud computing environment, with decentralised microservices and redundant resources, supporting a plethora of port-specific operations conducted with the help of waterborne robotics with different equipment configurations, that can be remotely operated and monitored in real time over cross-platform, lightweight applications.