Networked Visual Servoing as Use-Case for Cloud-based Industrial Robot Control

Nowadays production industry and smart factory is dealing with methods of optimal resource load balancing and new types of flexible service-oriented strategies. It is seen crucial to adapt quickly to changes in manufacturing processes and new products or even integrate new hardware faster than the competition. Flexibility and Scalability can be improved by exchanging only a certain part of hardware and software without the need of touching all the other components. In this paper we present a methodical approach towards a typical use case in modern industrial robotic systems. The system consists of hardware components from different manufacturers which can be controlled and monitored separately by remote services. Those services can be combined to complex applications and integrate value added services. We show the independence and capability of exchangeable added value services running either centralized, decentralized, locally or remote. The experiments demonstrate how a process is improve by simply adding another service according to the Plug-and-Play paradigm. The service ensures the conditions of a computer vision system component to keep the reliability of the overall system workflow. In addition it will be demonstrated how system components could be virtualized in container-based cloud environments to save required on-board resources of the robotic system while keeping the whole system communication secure. Finally, results will be presented for different intercommunication scenarios.