In modern day robotic applications, the use of cloud computing is being considered as a viable option giving rise to development of cloud robotics environment. Robots are also being developed to operate under an organized framework of robot operating system (ROS) for flexibility and better integration with robots of different types. In this work, an investigation is presented on the development of a mobile robotic platform and its integration in a ROS enabled cloud robotics environment. A mobile robotic platform was built with different sensors including a depth camera, integrated with Arduino and raspberry pi for interfacing the sensors, the drive system and on-board local processing of signals and with wireless communication capability for transmission and receiving data. The robot was operated using ROS framework within a cloud robotics network. Two issues of robot operation in ROS enabled cloud environment, namely, latency and data integrity were investigated for the developed robot under different operating conditions. The system was tested for baseline connectivity and under low bandwidth environment and performance was found to be satisfactory in the areas of latency and data integrity. Ongoing and future extensions are proposed to integrate this current robot with other existing robots within the ROS enabled cloud robotics environment
