Development and Evaluation of IoT System Consisting of ROS-based Robot, Edge and Cloud

Abstract

The data collected by Internet of Things (IoT) devices equipped with sensors enable smart home services such as monitoring the elderly, pets, and the indoor environment. Building an IoT system to collect data from individual households in the cloud requires measures to reduce communication latency and the amount of data transferred, and protect privacy. When collecting diverse data in an indoor environment, installing sensors in multiple indoor locations is necessary. However, installing numerous sensors increases costs and makes it difficult to relocate the sensors to obtain the necessary information. In this study, we construct an IoT system for a smart home that collects indoor environmental information using a wheeled mobile robot implemented in a Robot Operating System (ROS) and performs analysis processing in a cloud via an edge server. We attempt to demonstrate the effectiveness of sensor data collection using a robot by developing a prototype system for indoor carbon dioxide concentration monitoring application. We also the performance characteristics of ROS communication between the sensor robot and the edge server, and IoT communication between the edge server and the cloud server under different communication environments to identify technical issues in the smart home.