Towards An Architecture-Centric Approach to Manage Variability of Cloud Robotics

Cloud robotics is a field of robotics that attempts to invoke Cloud technologies such as Cloud computing, Cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centered around the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services for robotics. In a few short years, Cloud robotics as a newly emerged field has already received much research and industrial attention. The use of the Cloud for robotics and automation brings some potential benefits largely ameliorating the performance of robotic systems. However, there are also some challenges. First of all, from the viewpoint of architecture, how to model and describe the architectures of Cloud robotic systems? How to manage the variability of Cloud robotic systems? How to maximize the reuse of their architectures? In this paper, we present an architecture approach to easily design and understand Cloud robotic systems and manage their variability.