Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions

The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space, but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers. These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems. Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201

Middleware platform for distributed applications incorporating robots, sensors and the cloud

Cyber-physical systems in the factory of the future will consist of cloud-hosted software governing an agile production process executed by autonomous mobile robots and controlled by analyzing the data from a vast number of sensors. CPSs thus operate on a distributed production floor infrastructure and the set-up continuously changes with each new manufacturing task. In this paper, we present our OSGibased middleware that abstracts the deployment of servicebased CPS software components on the underlying distributed platform comprising robots, actuators, sensors and the cloud. Moreover, our middleware provides specific support to develop components based on artificial neural networks, a technique that recently became very popular for sensor data analytics and robot actuation. We demonstrate a system where a robot takes actions based on the input from sensors in its vicinity

Edge Offloading in Smart Grid

The energy transition supports the shift towards more sustainable energy alternatives, paving towards decentralized smart grids, where the energy is generated closer to the point of use. The decentralized smart grids foresee novel data-driven low latency applications for improving resilience and responsiveness, such as peer-to-peer energy trading, microgrid control, fault detection, or demand response. However, the traditional cloud-based smart grid architectures are unable to meet the requirements of the new emerging applications such as low latency and high-reliability thus alternative architectures such as edge, fog, or hybrid need to be adopted. Moreover, edge offloading can play a pivotal role for the next-generation smart grid AI applications because it enables the efficient utilization of computing resources and addresses the challenges of increasing data generated by IoT devices, optimizing the response time, energy consumption, and network performance. However, a comprehensive overview of the current state of research is needed to support sound decisions regarding energy-related applications offloading from cloud to fog or edge, focusing on smart grid open challenges and potential impacts. In this paper, we delve into smart grid and computational distribution architec-tures, including edge-fog-cloud models, orchestration architecture, and serverless computing, and analyze the decision-making variables and optimization algorithms to assess the efficiency of edge offloading. Finally, the work contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the edge offloading in smart grid, providing a SWOT analysis to support decision making.Comment: to be submitted to journa

AI-Based Sustainable and Intelligent Offloading Framework for IIoT in Collaborative Cloud-Fog Environments

The cloud paradigm is one of the most trending areas in today’s era due to its rich profusion of services. However, it fails to serve the latency-sensitive Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications associated with automotives, robotics, oil and gas, smart communications, Industry 5.0, etc. Hence, to strengthen the capabilities of IIoT, fog computing has emerged as a promising solution for latency-aware IIoT tasks. However, the resource-constrained nature of fog nodes puts forth another substantial issue of offloading decisions in resource management. Therefore, we propose an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled intelligent and sustainable framework for an optimized multi-layered integrated cloud fog-based environment where real-time offloading decisions are accomplished as per the demand of IIoT applications and analyzed by a fuzzy based offloading controller. Moreover, an AI based Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) has been incorporated into a framework that promises to search for the best possible resources and make accurate decisions to ameliorate various Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters. The experimental results show an escalation in makespan time up to 37.17%, energy consumption up to 27.32%, and execution cost up to 13.36% in comparison to benchmark offloading and allocation schemes