The RoboEarth Cloud Engine. A Platform-as-a-Service framework for robots.
Robots can help us in many ways. They vaccum our floors. Help us do great research, are fun to play with ..
.. and who knows, may soon bring us breakfast in bed.
Doing these things well requires lots of
computation.
And the smarter we want our robots to be the
more computation and memory they need.
This means our robots are often heavy and
expensive. That's a problem.
There is a better way!
This newly means moving some of that
computation away from the robots into the cloud
And that makes buildings smart robots much easier.
Meet Robby the robot.
Each morning Robby prepares breakfast.
But he is frequently intimidated by all
the different breakfast foods.
He has trouble recognizing the many
different items and finds it difficult
to pick them up with his gripper.
In addition he has trouble placing items on
the table because each morning the
chairs are in different positions
blocking his path.
This means Robby takes five hours to
set the breakfast table
Frustration rises. Something has to give.
One morning Robby decides to try
something new. The RoboEarth Cloud Engine.
Now Robby can move some of his heavy
computation into the cloud.
With the RoboEarth Cloud Engine Robby can take images of the different
breakfast foods and ask the cloud to extract 
texts and barcodes.
If he has not interacted with a
particular item before he can run a
grasp simulator to figure out how he should pick it up. With the RoboEarth Cloud Engine
Robby can now take on many other
tasks throughout the house instead of
only making breakfast.
Robby is relieved and so are his housemates.
Robby's friend Rosie is only equipped with an
infrared sensor and a wireless module.
She just transmits her sensor data and the cloud  
takes care of all the localization and mapping.
Using the RoboEarth Cloud Engine Rosie and Robby can now collaboratively build and
share the map of the house.
Now both of them have less trouble
moving around the chairs
With this accurate map and the RoboEarth
Cloud Engine telling where she is
Rosie can help quickly collect all the
crumbs under the breakfast table.
The next morning Robby finishes setting
the table in fifty minutes and Rosie
finishes the vacuum the entire house.
And with his worries about buying
expensive computers and constant system
administration gone their owner Igor can
focus on what he really loves to do ..
building new robots!
The cloud at your service
And all in open source (Apache 2.0).
The RoboEarth Cloud Engine.
