rapyuta.io > Understanding rapyuta.io > Introduction

Introduction

What is rapyuta.io

rapyuta.io is a platform that enables robotics solution development by providing the necessary software infrastructure and facilitating the interaction between multiple stakeholders who contribute to the solution development.

It also provides platform-as-a-service to manage cloud services that solve technical and production challenges of building, provisioning, running, and iterating on distributed robotic applications.

It enables developers to develop robot-enabled solutions that can be more complex, encompass a variety of robots, scale further and operate in multiple geographic locations.

Overview Map

Secure onboarding and management of robots

Easily onboard robots to rapyuta.io with the one-click onboarding process.

Access your robot’s state from anywhere with real-time remote monitoring of the system.

Configure device parameters remotely to meet the changing demands and environments.

Remotely analyze with live logs, historical logs, and ROS bags.

Debug and troubleshoot with secure remote SSH.

Simplified communication between robots and cloud

Get out-of-the-box encrypted machine-to-machine and machine-to-cloud communication.

Communication between remote sites over HTTPS or TLS.

No infrastructure modifications or overheads are needed.

Powerful cloud computation and storage

Access powerful computation and a wide range of storage options to overcome onboard limitations of the device.

Describe complex applications with multiple executables and components that can span across cloud, edge, and devices.

Software Lifecycle Management

Build, deploy and manage your applications on the cloud and devices with a unified set of tools.

Analyze the state of your deployments with introspection information about statuses, phases, and failure codes.

To view the different layers of the rapyuta.io platform, click here

Get started with a quick walkthrough.

Vision

Our mission is to empower lives with connected machines. Machine - from robots, automation equipment, servers to network devices - connected and coordinated in a streamlined way to increase efficiency and reduce the human effort in 3K - kitanai (dirty), kiken (dangerous), kitsui (demanding) - work.

To make these machines more accessible, we follow the cloud robotics model defined as

Cloud Robotics is a model enabling self-service, elastic, and ubiquitous access to a shared pool of robotics resources with open interfaces.

This model is inspired by the cloud computing model [1] is a broader definition of Cloud Robotics compared to the Cloud-connected Robotics definition by Kuffner[2].

[1]Mell, Peter, and Tim Grance. “The NIST definition of cloud computing."(2011).

[2]Kuffner, James. “Cloud-Enabled-Robots” (2010)

Our Origins

Our journey on Cloud Robotics started with RoboEarth, an EU-funded project from 2010 to 2014, whose goal is to create an internet for robots, where robots could enjoy both a shared (via a common knowledge base) and an extended (via servers in a data center) brain.

The founding members of what would become Rapyuta Robotics made up the ETH Zurich team of the RoboEarth project. Our partners included six universities and the Dutch electronics giant Philips. For more details on our prior work, have a look at the following papers and videos:

G. Mohanarajah, D. Hunziker, R. D’Andrea and M. Waibel, “Rapyuta: A Cloud Robotics Platform,” in IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 481-493, April 2015.
G. Mohanarajah, V. Usenko, M. Singh, R. D’Andrea and M. Waibel, “Cloud-Based Collaborative 3D Mapping in Real-Time With Low-Cost Robots,” in IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 423-431, April 2015.