Cloud Robotics for 5G

Abstract: Technological advances in cloud technology, robotics, and telecommunications could provide for new and interesting applications. This thesis investigates how a combination of these areas can be utilized in order to improve performance in a smart manufacturing setting. In doing so, an architecture based on the Actor model has been used. The proposed architecture is both described from a theoretical point of view and implemented as a proof of concept. In the implementation the ABB robot Yumi is used to solve a 2x2 Rubik’s cube with a solver executing in a cloud environment. Furthermore, the implementation has been designed to fit with future generations of telecommunications, e.g., 5G. In order to achieve this a framework developed by Ericsson AB, called Calvin, has been used. The results show that the proposed architecture can be implemented as well as point out areas for future research or development. In particular, dynamic aspects were found to be interesting areas for future work. In addition, it was concluded that business aspects are bound to play a vital role in the development and use of these architectures. Therefore, some scenarios, showing how the technical benefits of the proposed architecture can be leveraged to add economic value, are presented.