Cloud Robotics: A Distributed Computing View

As an interdiscipline of distributed computing and robots, cloud robotics concerns augmenting robot capabilities by connecting them to the powerful backend cloud computing infrastructure. It is a field of great potential, and most recent discussions on this topic are from the point of view of robotics. In this paper, we discuss this field mainly from the aspect of distributed and cloud computing, i.e., "what distributed computing technologies can contribute to cloud robotics?" and "what challenges does cloud robotics bring to distributed computing?" This paper also presents our early experience towards a cloud robotic software infrastructure which is based on the newly-emerged edge computing model and supports the direct deployment of existing ROS (Robot Operating System) packages.