A Scalable Resource Management Architecture for Industrial Fog Robots

Smart factories call for a new system architecture to control massive industrial robots and sensors. Right after the concept of Cloud Robotics, Fog Robotics provide an appropriate architecture for this type of control system because of its low latency. Based on Fog Robotics, aiming at scalable resource management, we propose a Kubernetes-based microservice architecture for smart factories, including Terminal, Fog, and Cloud Layer. Kubernetes is utilized to settle the resource management of the architecture. Considering smart factory applications, we describe functions for each layer. To be specific, the warehouse scenario is studied for launching the architecture in reality. The requirements and difficulties are analyzed and settled by utilizing Robot Operating System (ROS) and microservices. ROS is used to provide the interfaces of robots and data. Warehouse tasks are separated into different microservices to develop and update conveniently. A case study in warehouses is provided, which considers the standardization, industrial requirements, and microservices. Based on path planning microservices and ROS, experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance while expanding the architecture. The results demonstrate the feasibility of launching the architecture in real applications.