Introduction

Welcome

Welcome to the rapyuta.io documentation, where you can find information and guides to help you learn about rapyuta.io and start exploring its features.

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.

In Detail

The software infrastructure can be seen as a collection of the following four layers and the facilitation is enabled by hardware and software catalogs. rapyuta.io layer architecture

  • Machine Layer
    Monitor the machine and manage the onboard software - remotely via API or Web UI.
  • Communications Layer
    Secure and scalable machine-to-machine and machine-to-cloud communication with ROS compatibility.
  • Computation Layer
    Build, ship, monitor, and control distributed applications running on any machine anywhere.
  • Intelligence Layer
    Distributed intelligence that gives your heterogeneous multi-robot system the robustness and flexibility.
  • Composition Tooling
    Compose, simulate, and deploy your applications with the community all in one place.
  • Software Catalog
    Leverage software features from all across the globe. Batteries included for Enterprise Clients: laser-based localization, navigation, and depalletization.
  • Hardware Catalog
    Choose the hardware that best suits your needs or offer your hardware to the world.

What does it solve

Given the multi-domain and embryonic stage of the robotics industry, robotics solution developers face the following three challenges: lack of expertise, limited budget, and time. The pain points of the solution provider and gains using the project’s J-curve.

J curve

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: