Cloud-Based Framework for Robot Operation in Hospital Environments

The robotics field is widely used in the industrial domain, but nowadays several other domains could also take advantage of it. This interdisciplinary branch of engineering requires the use of human interfaces, efficient communication systems, high storage and processing capabilities, among other issues, to perform complex tasks. This paper aims to propose a cloud-based framework platform for robot operation in a hospital environment, addressing some challenges, such as communications security and processing/storage features. The recent developments in the artificial intelligence field and cloud resources sharing are allowing the penetration of robots in unstructured environments. However, some new challenges and solutions need to be tested in real environments. Our main contribution is to decrease the time-consumption related to processing and storage costs, associated with the physical processing resources of the robots. Also, the proposed methods provide an increase of the processing variables that are not yet present in the physical resources, such as in the case of robots with limited processing time or storage capabilities. This paper presents a platform based on Cloud Computing with services to support processing, storage and analytics applied to hospital environments. The proposed platform enables to achieve a decrease in the time-consumption, especially when it is intended to retrieve information about all robot activities.