A Cloud Architecture for Educational Enterprises: A Case Study in Robotics

Abstract

This work presents a Cloud Computing environment with support for educational robotics. The general purpose is to evaluate principles and methodologies to provide virtualized management architecture for educational enterprises in open source Cloud domains. These environments bring many advantages to its users as affordable cost of implementation and maintenance, large scale of resources integration, and others. We especially highlight its inherent low-level delays when performing remote experiments from outside enterprise’s domain. In robotics, Internet overheads and delays have significant impact by reducing performance on experiments, and with a virtualized architecture in Cloud, this effect can be minimized. To achieve this, services and applications run on virtualized desktops in the Cloud with fast network connections. Users can log into their virtual machines hosted on local servers with common Internet. Once logged, users can benefit from fast local network to interact with the available resources. Cloud Computing is performed under these conditions to have its potentiality evaluated. Also, guidelines are described to reduce the effort to offer applications in these environments according to the proposed open source architecture. Many companies are focusing on this emergent paradigm seeking cost reductions, high availability of pre-configured computational infrastructures, billing proportional to demand, and others. In robotics, virtualization in Cloud is an alternative to keep collaborations between students and to promote safe and robust integration of geographically distant robotic resources. Implementations of remote experiments are discussed, showing how to make robotic Cloud domains possible with open source tools in these decentralized environments.