Towards a Cloud-Based System Architecture for Drain Inspection Robots

Abstract

Complex robotic tasks nowadays are demanding more computational resources than ever before. This results in an increase in load on the computers on-board the robots. This issue can be addressed through leveraging the power of the cloud to offload computationally intensive tasks. The current paper introduces a robot-cloud system architecture that can accommodate multiple drain inspection robots and fleets. This also provides a flexible arrangement to store the gigantic sensor data, into specific databases, generated from the robot fleet. Throughput tests involving stress loading a developmental virtual machine, in a private cloud, and a Raspberry Pi, from a drain inspection robot, was experimented and presented in the current paper. Latency tests under different networks were also tested while deploying the robot in a drainage.