Abstract:

Several institutes and researcher centers get the assistance of social robot to accomplish their tasks or achieve different objective. Assistance Robot can be asked for a daily activity such as record sessions and the discussion that happens to be used later by any absent student.

Service-oriented architecture and cloud computing are becoming a dominant computing paradigm. Robots are prepared to connect to a cloud computing infrastructure and access vast amounts of processing power and data using special web services which use HTTP transmission protocol through WiFi.

Normally, data from the robot can be streamed using ROS nodes to the cloud server during connectivity and high bandwidth. However, for cases that raise privacy concerns or where bandwidth instability is an issue, we propose a new mechanism for transferring large amounts of information with different data formats by compressing it in a single container. This leads to reduced transmission time and increased safety, because the container is invalid before the extraction phase.

WebM is an open source, media file format designed for the web, and defines the file container structure, video and audio formats only. Therefore, we propose a distributed system CDDS (Compress Decompress different Data formats distributed System) consists of two applications and a web service. While the first application is responsible for creating a new container file which contains several channels to save different data types, the second one is responsible for the extraction phase from the container. The former application will be implemented on a robot to reduce the size of the transferred data and the latter will be implemented on the cloud server.

Our final goal is to execute the distributed system where both applications can integrate and exchange data through the web service and save the extracted streamed data on the cloud storage to be accessed by students later on.

A use case scenario is presented, which proposes the described mechanism between a social assistive robot in universities and a cloud server employed as a web and storage server. We report data from two experiments, the first one use gazebo simulator to stream image data from a camera and EDF file and the second from a social humanoid robot that streams video, audio and text. Finally, we illustrate the potential benefits of our distributed system.

Keywords:

Assistive Robot, e-learning, distributed system, cloud storage, communication, technology.