Fog-Enabled Multi-Robot System

Robots are used widely in many fields now, such as earthquake rescue, smart factory, and so on. They bring us lots of convenience in daily lives, save huge manpower in factories, and help to complete many mission-possible tasks in some cases. For these applications, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), efficient management, and collaboration among robots are necessary. However, in these robot applications, it may suffer issues of high cost, large power consumption, and low efficiency. An effective solution is to employ fog computing. This chapter introduces fog-enabled solutions for robot SLAM, multi-robot smart factory, and multi-robot fleet formation applications, which require large local computing power for timely constructing the map of a working environment, calculating multiple robots’ exact positions, and tracking their movement postures and orientations. Through a high-speed wireless network, massive data and images collected by onboard and local sensors are transmitted from the robots and intelligent infrastructure to nearby fog nodes, where intelligent data processing algorithms are responsible for analyzing valuable information and deriving the results in real time.