Robots as-a-Service in Cloud Computing: Search and Rescue in Large-scale Disasters Case Study

Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to enable a myriad of applications by interconnecting objects -such as sensors and robots -over the Internet. IoT applications range from healthcare to autonomous vehicles and include disaster management. Enabling these applications in cloud environments requires the design of appropriate IoT Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IoT IaaS) to ease the provisioning of the IoT objects as cloud services. This paper discusses a case study on search and rescue IoT applications in large-scale disaster scenarios. It proposes an IoT IaaS architecture that virtualizes robots (IaaS for robots) and provides them to the upstream applications as-a-Service. Node-and Network-level robots virtualization are supported. The proposed architecture meets a set of identified requirements, such as the need for a unified description model for heterogeneous robots, publication/ discovery mechanism, and federation with other IaaS for robots when needed. A validating proof of concept is built and experiments are made to evaluate its performance. Lessons learned and prospective research directions are discussed.