Android, Cloud-based Apps and Robots
I recently switched jobs and now work at Motorola Mobility as a Test Engineer for cloud-based services. In my new role, I work intimately with Motorola phones/devices such as the Droid Bionic, the Android OS, custom software that our software team develops on top of Android and a host of Web services on the cloud. Given this change of environment (I worked previously at a 3D mapping technology startup), I decided to expand my project focus to leverage the rich technology that I have access to at work. Expect more posts on these topics in future.
Android no doubt is on a meteoric rise and now captures 50% of the US smartphone market (38% worldwide), although competition with the iPhone is fierce:
 |
 |
At the same time, "apps on the cloud" is a sizzling field with the major players such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon jockeying for position. This got me asking: what is the synergy between robots, the Android OS and cloud services? As it turns out, this topic is fertile ground. Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Cloud Robotics
Google recently formed a new Cloud Robotics group headed by Ryan Hickman. His team is developing techology to enable a robot to offload computationally heavy tasks such as object recognition and path planning to powerful cloud servers, freeing up the its local processor to focus on immediate problems such as avoiding obstacles and getting out of messy situations. This is needed because robots typically run on embedded processors that have limited processing power (and memory, disk storage, etc.). Futhermore by deploying a remote processing service, expensive resources can be efficiently shared among robots that need them. One can think of more advanced scenarios. For example, robots can individually upload data they have locally acquired to the cloud to build collective knowledge. The cloud service can also coordinate multiple robot agents to work as a group.
Here’s a video of their talk at Google I/O 2011 decribing how cloud robotics works.
And Ryan and team’s Google I/O presentation slides: Cloud Enabled Robots
As part of this initiative, Google teamed up with Willow Garage to develop rosjava, a Java implementation of ROS (Robot Operating System). The beauty of rosjava is that brings a complete robot software stack into Android. Anyone with an Android device now has a powerful tool to create robot applications!
CellBots
CellBots is a site started by a group of hobbyists to promoting mobile phones as a low-cost, robotic control platform.
To get started, download and install the app to your Android smartphone. Once installed, you can use your phone in two modes: (1) as a remote contol to send commands to the robot, or (2) as the robot’s actual "brain". The CellBot app supports several robot platforms including the iRobot, Lego Mindstorms, Vex Pro while others have created custom robots using Arduino microcontrollers and R/C model tanks/trucks as the robot base.
Check out the CellBots site for more info.
Of course, all of this means more opportunity to learn about robots, Android and cloud apps. What fun times!