Design of a Robotic as a Service Platform to Perform Rehabilitation Therapies

Abstract

The NAOTherapist architecture is a robotic platform which aims to help patients with Cerebral Palsy and Obstetric Brachial Palsy to improve their condition, through the autonomous interaction provided by a social robot. This work is a Proof of Concept to evaluate if the NAOTherapist Architecture can be distributed into several computers, to get the benefits from Cloud Computing and Robotics as a Service. This work focuses on the enhancement of the NAOTherapist architecture, in which some of the components that compose the architecture have been integrated into a cloud server. This new architecture allows to protect the source code from being copied and to share the resources charged with the intelligence of the platform. The distributed architecture introduce new problems as the communication delay caused by the communication over the network. Then, this problems has been evaluated both technically and surveying the patients involved in the experiments performed. These evaluations have shown promising results, confirming that it is possible to deploy NAOTherapist as a Robotics as a Service.