A comprehensive survey of recent trends in cloud robotics architectures and applications

Cloud robotics has recently emerged as a collaborative technology between cloud computing and service robotics enabled through progress in wireless networking, large scale storage and communication technologies, and the ubiquitous presence of Internet resources over recent years. Cloud computing empowers robots by offering them faster and more powerful computational capabilities through massively parallel computation and higher data storage facilities. It also offers access to open-source, big datasets and software, cooperative learning capabilities through knowledge sharing, and human knowledge through crowdsourcing. The recent progress in cloud robotics has led to active research in this area spanning from the development of cloud robotics architectures to its varied applications in different domains. In this survey paper, we review the recent works in the area of cloud robotics technologies as well as its applications. We draw insights about the current trends in cloud robotics and discuss the challenges and limitations in the current literature, open research questions and future research directions.