Cyber-physical cloud computing implemented as PaaS

Abstract

We describe a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) system for per-forming multi-customer information acquisition missions on unmanned vehicle swarms operated and maintained by a third party. Customers implement their missions completely unaware of each other and the available vehicle infrastruc-ture. Vehicle swarm providers may add or remove vehi-cles unnoticed by customers for maintenance, recharging, and refueling. To achieve this, we apply the paradigm of cloud computing to virtualized versions of unmanned vehi-cles. Our implementation allows the simulation of multi-customer information acquisition missions as well as their execution on real hardware running the robot operating sys-tem (ROS).