Robot control as a service — Towards cloud-based motion planning and control for industrial robots

This paper introduces a new concept for flexible motion planning and control of industrial robots. Instead of a closed monolithic architecture, an open service-based framework is proposed. The services can be run hardware-independent on a decentralized IT infrastructure (Cloud) allowing a fast reconfiguration of control modules and their multiple usage in different tasks. The services can be run on a dedicated PC or on individual virtual machines inside a single computing cluster. The proposed service-based framework was implemented and tested for the motion planning of a robotic manipulator. Effects on control performance, availability and scalability are investigated and documented.