Fog robotics can be defined as an architecture which consists of storage, networking functions, control with

fog computing Fog computing or fog networking, also known as fogging, is an architecture that uses edge devices to carry out a substantial amount of computation (edge computing), storage, and communication locally and routed over the Internet backbone. Concep ...

closer to

robot A robot is a machine—especially one Computer program, programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions Automation, automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the robot control, co ...

s.Fog Robotics: An Introduction. Gudi, S.L.K.C., et al. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. 2017
/ref>

Concept

Fog robotics mainly consists of a fog robot server and the cloud.Fog Robotics: A New Approach to Achieve Efficient and Fluent Human-Robot Interaction. Ingrid Fadelli, ECN Magazine, USA 2018
/ref> It acts as a companion to cloud by shoving the

data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted for ...

near to the user with the help of a local server. Moreover, these servers are adaptable, consists of processing power for

computation A computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that is well-defined. Common examples of computation are mathematical equation solving and the execution of computer algorithms. Mechanical or electronic devices (or, hist ...

, network capability, and secured by sharing the outcomes to other robots for advanced performance with the lowest possible latency. As cloud robotics is facing issues such as bandwidth limitations, latency issues,

quality of service Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...

privacy Privacy (, ) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of a ...

and

security Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercion). Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems, or any other entity or ...

- Fog robotics can be seen as a viable option for the future robotic systems.Getting a Grip on Reality: Deep Learning and Robot Grasping Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch, 2018
/ref> It is also considered as distributed robot systems of the next generation because robots require much brain power for processing billions of

s while performing its task.Robots and the return to collaborative intelligence. Ken Goldberg, Nature Machine Intelligence, 2019
/ref> For instance, fog robotics can play an essential role in helping a robot to grasp spray bottle.Robots can't hold stuff very well, but you can help Matt Simon, Wired, 2018
/ref>

History

Chand Gudi first coined the term "Fog Robotics" during the European Space Agency Competition and IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in 2017, pioneering a new concept in the field.

Applications

social robot A social robot is an autonomous robot that interacts and Human–robot interaction, communicates with humans or other autonomous physical Intelligent agent, agents by following social behaviors and rules attached to its role. Like other robots, ...

can either connect to the cloud or fog robot server depending upon the availability of information. For instance, it can make a

working at an airport to communicate with other robots for effective communication with the help of fog robotics.Fog robotics: A new approach to achieve efficient and fluent human-robot interaction. Ingrid Fadelli, Tech Xplore, UK 2018
/ref>

Fog robotic systems

Node-level systems: FogROS FogROS is a framework that allows existing Robot Operating System (ROS) automation applications to gain access to additional computing resources from commercial cloud-based services. With minimal porting effort, FogROS allows researchers to deploy components of their software to the cloud with high transparency. Algorithm-level system: ElasticROS ElasticROS enhances robot systems by advancing from node to algorithm-level adaptability. It's the robot operating system integrating algorithm-level collaboration for fog and cloud robotics, deploying Elastic Collaborative Computing for real-time adjustments.

Research

Fog Robotics
This project promotes the applicability of fog robotics with regards to human-robot interaction scenarios. It utilises fog robot servers, cloud, and the robots for evaluation of fog robotics architecture. To improve the

and performance of robotic/machine-learning applications operating in

edge computing Edge computing is a distributed computing model that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data. More broadly, it refers to any design that pushes computation physically closer to a user, so as to reduce the Latency (engineer ...

environments, this project investigates the use of data capsules. As one of the applications, it also examines the fog robot system to preserve the privacy and security of the data. This project particularly targets the field of

radio access network A radio access network (RAN) is part of a mobile telecommunication system implementing a radio access technology (RAT). Conceptually, it resides between a device such as a mobile phone, a computer, or any remotely controlled machine and provi ...

at the edge. As part of this project, a real-time application of fog-assisted robotics is explored. Also, remote monitoring of robots and fleet formation for coordinated movement is being investigated. This project focusses on designing novel programming models for Fog applications both hardware and

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

(OS) mechanisms including communication protocols of ''fog nodes''. These fog nodes will be further tested real time on robots and other

automation Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, mainly by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machine ...

devices. Furthermore, an

open-source architecture Open-source architecture is an emerging paradigm advocating new procedures in the imagination and formation of virtual and real spaces within a universal infrastructure. Drawing from references as diverse as open-source culture, modular design, av ...

will be built on open standards, e.g., 5G, OPC Unified Architecture (UA), and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN).

References