Recently, Amazon Web Services has announced the availability of AWS RoboMaker, a new service that makes it easy for developers to develop, test, and deploy robotics applications at scale.
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AWS RoboMaker provides an AWS Cloud9-based robotics integrated development environment for building and editing robotics applications. RoboMaker’s development environment includes the operating system, development software, and ROS automatically downloaded, compiled, and configured. Plus, RoboMaker cloud extensions and sample robotics applications are pre-integrated in the environment, so developers can get started in minutes." mentions AWS on its
website.
According to the company, AWS RoboMaker provides four core capabilities: cloud extensions for Robot Operating System (ROS), development environment, simulation, and fleet management. ROS is the most widely used open source robotics software framework.
RoboMaker provides extensions for cloud services like Amazon Kinesis (video stream), Amazon Recognition (image and video analysis), Amazon Lex (speech recognition), Amazon Polly (speech generation), and Amazon CloudWatch (logging and monitoring) ,these services are exposed as ROS packages making it easier to use them to build intelligent functions into robotics applications without having to learn a new framework or programming language.
The company claims, the new service will provide a fully managed robotics simulation that supports large scale and parallel simulations, and automatically scales the underlying infrastructure based on the complexity of the simulation along with pre-built virtual 3D worlds such as indoor rooms, retail stores, and race tracks.
AWS RoboMaker offers a fleet management service that has robot registry, security, and fault-tolerance built-in so that developers can deploy, perform over-the-air (OTA) updates, and manage robotics applications throughout the lifecycle of the robots
“We are planning to use autonomous ground vehicles and drones to make the construction industry more productive while reducing construction rework costs. Using a variety of imaging sensors, the collected data can be used to create 3D site models for planning and streamlining construction activities. With AWS RoboMaker, we are able to easily test the robotics related software applications in a cloud environment, and rapidly generate synthetic imaging data to train our 3D site model creation algorithms. AWS RoboMaker also provides the ideal fleet management solution for use on ground vehicles and drones. The integration between AWS RoboMaker fleet management and AWS Greengrass makes it really easy to enable communications among ground vehicles, drones, and IoT solutions.” said Hamid Montazeri, VP of SW Engineering and Robotics, Stanley Black & Decker
“We’re excited to utilize AWS RoboMaker, helping make it easier for students of all ages to develop, test, and deploy robotic applications. Offerings like these make it easier for FIRST to meet its mission – to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators by engaging them in mentor-based, science-focused programs,” said Don Bossi, President, FIRST
AWS RoboMaker is available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and will expand to additional regions in the coming year.