Towards a Cloud-Based System Architecture for Drain Inspection Robots

Complex robotic tasks nowadays are demanding more computational resources than ever before. This results in an increase in load on the computers on-board the robots. This issue can be addressed through leveraging the power of the cloud to offload computationally intensive tasks. The current paper introduces a robot-cloud system architecture that can accommodate multiple drain inspection robots and fleets. This also provides a flexible arrangement to store the gigantic sensor data, into specific databases, generated from the robot fleet. Throughput tests involving stress loading a developmental virtual machine, in a private cloud, and a Raspberry Pi, from a drain inspection robot, was experimented and presented in the current paper. Latency tests under different networks were also tested while deploying the robot in a drainage.