ROSLink: Bridging ROS with the Internet-of-Things for cloud robotics

Abstract

The integration of robots with the Internet is nowadays an emerging trend, as new form of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). This integration is crucially important to promote new types of cloud robotics applications where robots are virtualized, controlled and monitored through the Internet. This paper proposes ROSLink, a new protocol to integrate Robot Operating System (ROS) enabled-robots with the IoT. The motivation behind ROSLink is the lack of ROS functionality in monitoring and controlling robots through the Internet. Although, ROS allows control of a robot from a workstation using the same ROS master, however this solution is not scalable and rather limited to a local area network. Solutions proposed in recent works rely on centralized ROS Master or robot-side Web servers sharing similar limitations. Inspired from the MAVLink protocol, the proposed ROSLink protocol defines a lightweight asynchronous communication protocol between the robots and the end-users through the cloud. ROSLink leverages the use of a proxy cloud server that links ROS-enabled robots with users and allows the interconnection between them. ROSLink performance was tested on the cloud and was shown to be efficient and reliable.