Cloud Robotics

Dear Colleagues,

The domain of cloud robotics aims to converge robots with the elastic and on-demand computation, storage and communication resources provided by the cloud. The cloud may complement robotic resources in several ways, including crowd-sourcing knowledge databases, analysis of multi-modal context information, computational offloading or data-intensive information processing for artificial intelligence. 

Several trends are promising fields to further advance the state-of-the-art in cloud robotics. In the cloud domain, we have witnessed the emergence of more distributed infrastructure, known under various names like cloudlets, edge computing or fog computing. New cluster management techniques have emerged, such as orchestrators for container-based deployments of micro-service architectures, software-defined networking etc. Lastly, next-generation wireless and mobile network technologies bring reduced latency and increasing bandwidth.

In the robotics domain, we see a rising number of robots that move outside of the well-controlled lab environment into realistic operational conditions where other actors (including humans) are active. This requires robots to have a better perception and cognitive understanding of their environment. This can be realized by deep learning, including reinforcement learning for robotic control. Here, the cloud can be used for sharing and processing of multi-modal data, domain knowledge and experience, and for running the heavy computations involved with these machine learning techniques. Another way to improve the perception and cognition is by embedding robots into the Internet-of-Things.

The objective of this Special Issue is therefore to promote a deeper understanding of major conceptual and technical challenges in the various disciplines of robotics (e.g. perception, cognition, control) that leverage on the cloud. We are seeking for contributions in both robotic algorithms as cloud frameworks and architectures supporting robots. Lastly, we welcome articles that provide a detailed overview of concrete use cases in different application domains, such as health care, agriculture, search-and-rescue, Industry 4.0, security, etc.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• architectures and middleware solutions for cyber-physical systems, integrating robots with the cloud, the edge and/or the Internet-of-Things
• distributed sensing, planning and actuation
• cloud-based control systems of robots, possibly  using deterministic wireless or wired networking
• computational offloading of robotic processing workloads
• cloud-based knowledge processing services for robotics
• cloud-assisted deep learning techniques in robotic disciplines such as perception, cognition or control
• long-term robot autonomy based on big data, knowledge sharing and IoT
• security and liability of cloud-based/remote robot controllers, e.g., by using blockchain
• transfer learning between tasks or across robotic systems
• cloud robotic use cases: implementation details, performance measurements and lessons learnt

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Robotics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• cloud offload
• robotic knowledge processing services and databases
• deep learning for robotics
• Internet-of-Robotic-Things
• cloud robotics
• cloud frameworks and architectures for robotic processing workloads