I wanted to tell you the results of the Cloud Robotics Working Group meeting from 2024-03-11. We met to discuss the long-term strategy of the group. You can see the full meeting recording on vimeo, with our meeting minutes here (thanks to Phil Roan for taking minutes this meeting!).
During the meeting, we went over some definitions of Cloud Robotics, our tenets going forward, and a phase approach of gathering data, analyzing it, and acting on it. We used slides to frame the discussion, which have since been updated from the discussion and will form the backbone of our discussion going forwards. The slide deck is publicly available here.
Next meeting will be about how to start collecting the data for the first phase. We will hold it 2024-03-25T17:00:00Z→2024-03-25T18:00:00Z. If you’d like to join the group, you are welcome to, and you can sign up for our meeting invites at this Google Group.
Finally, we will regularly invite members and guests to give talks in our meetings. If you have a topic you’d like to talk about, or would like to invite someone to talk, please use this speaker signup sheet to let us know.
I just saw the recording of the meeting and @chfritz had validly mentioned projects for the data-collection phase in the cloud. I think we should use this thread as a conversation opener to delve deeper into the same topic
My take:
These are possible suggestions that I previously mentioned in the other thread
If we’re going to stick to the data collection tool (I’ve called it the streaming API as data is being streamed from the robot to the server) I’d like us to discuss how we implement the API
Strongly agree with @chfritz proposal of making ROS2 cloud ready, I think he makes a lot of sense with this point. There is definitely a need for us to do this in the cloud because it simplifies the access and availability
My understanding is that the “data collection” we discussed yesterday is not collecting data from robots but rather collecting “data” from developers, companies, and the community regarding cloud robotics. This data includes:
Problems
Needs
Opportunities
Existing Solutions
As such, your list above is a good data point to add to the collection.
Great meeting, very informative. Yes, there is a lot of problems I see, in that field and solutions I have been working on in my research and have implemented those solutions. It would be great to talk about problems that engineers, companies and community are trying to solve.
I know a lot of you have encountered a lot of problem that are needed fixing with cloud robotics. The next meeting I would assume would be focusing on those issues.
Following last week’s meeting where we discussed our definition of cloud robotics and the near-term agenda for the working group, in the meeting on Monday we will start with the data collection phase. Please attend to help us answer the following questions:
What role does the cloud play in robotics?
for development
for production
What are the challenges to realizing the potential of cloud robotics? e.g., in terms of
communication (networking, protocols, etc.)
security
cost
How do people currently go about this?
What tools and resources, either specific to robotics or in general, exist to make this easier?
What tools or resources do you wish would exist?
These questions are open-ended on purpose to invite discussion.
Personally I believe that every robotics company needs to have a strategy regarding cloud tooling, so I believe there are many people in this community that have both the experience and the incentive to help us answer the above questions. Please consider attending. This is your chance to influence the future direction of this working group. The input we gather here will influence the projects we’ll define in later phases of the WG around tools to build to addresses the identified needs. We are particularly interested to see participation and hear from folks that have deployed and operated large fleets in production.
As always, if you know of people who might be interested in this group but do not regularly read ROS Discourse, please invite them to this thread or the meeting itself. Thanks.