Rapyuta: The RoboEarth Cloud Engine

 

It is our pleasure to announce the first public release of Rapyuta: The RoboEarth Cloud Engine. Rapyuta is an open source cloud robotics platform for robots. It implements a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) framework designed specifically for robotics applications.

Rapyuta helps robots to offload heavy computation by providing secured customizable computing environments in the cloud. Robots can start their own computational environment, launch any computational node uploaded by the developer, and communicate with the launched nodes using the WebSockets protocol.

The above figure shows a simplified overview of the Rapyuta framework: Each robot connected to Rapyuta has a secured computing environment (rectangular boxes) giving them the ability to move their heavy computation into the cloud. Computing environments have a high bandwidth connection to the RoboEarth knowledge repository (stacked circular disks). This allows robots to process data directly inside the computational environment in the cloud without the need for downloading and local processing. Furthermore, computing environments are tightly interconnected with each other. This paves the way for the deployment of robotic teams.

The name Rapyuta is inspired from the movie Tenku no Shiro Rapyuta (English title: Castle in the Sky) by Hayao Miyazaki, where Rapyuta is the castle in the sky inhabited by robots.

To learn more and contribute to this open-source effort, visit: http://rapyuta.org/.