Agent driven Peer-to-Peer Cloud Robotics

Cloud enabled robotics is currently understood as one or many robotic clients making use of the resources and services made available by remote servers placed across the network cloud. These servers provide gateways to access the infrastructure, platform, software, algorithm or process as a service. Tapping into online infrastructure and knowledge saves the cost of carrying all required capabilities onboard the robot. In peer-to-peer cloud computing, every robot can act as a service provider. This paper presents a meta-model for enabling agent driven trade over local and global network clouds. The presented meta-model is one of the five views of HTM5, a five-view hyperactive transaction meta-model for multi agent system design. The meta-model represents the robots by their respective agents in the cloud, along with special agents which host and maintain service and demand registry. The robotic agents may have predefined relationships and service contracts with other robotic agents. Special agents are present in the system to maintain the trade between agents which have a predefined relationship or a trade contract. Unlike client-server based cloud robotics, the peer-to-peer structure enables a more active exchange of services between the robots. The presence of a relationship and contract based mechanism for trade preserves the fundamental business logics of cloud computing.