Is Amazon AWS Robomaker worth it?

Amazon released AWS Robomaker last year (2018) as a service that makes it easy to create robotics applications at scale. But, what does it mean and how this could help us in our developments and release of real products?

The product

AWS RoboMaker nowadays is focused on extending the Robot Operating System (ROS) framework with cloud services. [1].

AWS Robomaker service suite includes nowadays (2019) the following components:

• Cloud Extensions for ROS: With them, it is possible to offload some resource-intensive computing processes that are used in robotics applications to the cloud and free up local compute resources. These extensions allows to integrate with AWS services like Amazon Kinesis Video Streams for video streaming, Amazon Rekognition for image and video analysis, Amazon Lex for speech recognition, Amazon Polly for speech generation, and Amazon CloudWatch for logging and monitoring. RoboMaker provides each of these cloud service extensions as open source ROS packages, so it is possible to build functions on the robot by taking advantage of cloud APIs[2]. Having said that, obviously AWS charges fees per usage of the cloud services. This seems to be the business model of AWS Robomaker for Amazon.

• Development Environment, based on AWS Cloud9, so it is possible to launch a dedicated workspace to edit, run, and debug robotics application code. 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.

• Simulation system based on Gazebo, that supports large scale and parallel simulations, and automatically scales the underlying infrastructure based on the complexity of the simulation.

• Fleet Management service allows over-the-air deployment to deploy a robotics application into a robot fleet securely, so updates could be easily deployed in a full fleet or part of a fleet of robots.

(C) Amazon AWS Robomaker

Observations

The product sounds really interesting, but let's consider the following goods and bads from my personal point of view:

• One of the interesting things of being cloud based is that it could be used for development from anywhere, without the need to have ROS installed in the developers PC. This is a good starting point, but this is not usually a preferred long term solutions for developers, who use their preferred IDEs and tools for static code analysis. Anyway you could always use your IDE and tools and use only AWS cloud services.

• This solution support ROS Kinetic and Melody, the latest two long term support versions of ROS1, also it supports ROS2.

• Cloud extensions are really interesting. Having the capacity to run powerful computer vision algorithms in a massive computational environment in a transparent way is definitely a good option. The same happens with the other cloud based services offered by AWS. But you have to keep in mind that you need to ensure a reliable communications channel if your dependency to the cloud services is critical to your specific application to work properly. 

• It is very interesting that AWS Robomaker is always considering the idea of a fleet, so simulations and services could be used for the full set of robots.

• One of the things I really like is the option to deploy updated OTA (Over-the-air) to one or more robots in a fleet. Imagine you have 10 robots installed in a customer. If you update all of them in a shot may be risky. With this service you could update just one, then three and after everything is ok, then the rest, easily, with no headaches. 

• One of the things I like of the cloud services offered by AWS is that you pay per use, so you may even charge to customers based on this model in case you offer a robot-as-service business model

• You also could have cloud based metrics of the robots, so you could do preventive maintenance or monitoring.

• About the simulations, definitely developers could create much more powerful simulations in AWS Robomaker than if they have Gazebo simulator locally installed in their top notch powerful PCs, as AWS offer expandable computing power. This is just a question of how much computing power you need and how much money you are prepared to pay.

• About real product applications, nowadays I see that there is a risk on the dependency for reliable wifi connection. If your application depends on it, you need to implement alternative ways of communications, so you may need to implement a solution that switches from wifi to 4G in case wifi fails or degrade.

• Last thing is that somehow using AWS you need to accept that you are creating a dependency to these services, so you will not be easily able to implement other similar solutions with on-board computing in the future. Anyway, Amazon looks to be a good partner for a long term relationship.

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Reference:

[1] What is AWS Robomaker: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/en_pv/robomaker/latest/dg/what-is-robomaker.html

[2]AWS Robomaker web page: https://aws.amazon.com/robomaker