A Cloud Robotic Application Platform Design Based on the Microservices Architecture

The paradigm of cloud robotics points out a direction for the future development of robots. By deploying robotic applications in the cloud, the workload and cost of local robots are greatly reduced. The rise of microservices and cloud-native technology provides conveniences and guarantees for the development and deployment of cloud applications. This paper proposes a cloud robotic application platform design based on microservices. With the help of Robot Operating System (ROS), we can use the existing rich and diverse robot software packages and deploy them in the cloud without extra modifications. Through the microservices architecture and container technology, robotic applications can be further decoupled in the cloud. That improves the flexibility and compatibility of the platform and embodies the core idea of microservices. In the end, we present a demonstration to cooperate with a simulated robot to complete the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) task, which verifies the feasibility of our design.