# Implementation of Robots Integration in Scaled Laboratory Environment for Factory Automation
## 2 State of the Art
### Integration of Cloud-Enabled Robot Systems  
The idea of separating robot hardware from computational resources and high-level reasoning is not new. In [23], the author introduced remote-grained robots as a way to accomplish effective robotic architecture, multi-robot coordination, reconfigurable and distributed modular systems and so on. This approach enabled intelligent behaviors of multi-limbed robots and opened new fields of research such as networked robots and cloud-enabled robots [24,25]. In the first case, a stand-alone robot, environment sensors, and humans communicate and cooperate through a network. The second case brings a distributed structure of information and decision making, where cloud computing is used for various calculations to overcome limited onboard storage and computing resources. In a general case, premises for the efficient realization of a distributed multi-robot system are the same as for the single robot systems [26]:  
* Environment perception as the vital ability of a system to build knowledge about its surrounding. Collecting information about environment structure and location of obstacles gives robots the ability to predict their future states. The environment perception task usually involves infrared (IR), light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors, cameras, etc., and often fused information from these devices. * Localization as a capability of robots to estimate their position and orientation with respect to the environment. * Navigation includes the previous two tasks and combines them with an effective planning system. Usually, this task is solved by engaging processes of map building and localization simultaneously, i.e., simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) [27]. In order to improve a robot's sensing, computation and memory resources, the utilization of cloud architecture arises as a promising approach in the development of robotics systems [28,29]. Based on such integration, cloud-enabled robotics has several advantages, such as the following:  
* With increased computational power and storage space, computation-intensive tasks can be performed in real time, using the cloud infrastructure (computer vision, speech recognition, object recognition, etc.). * This infrastructure can hold large data, such as global maps, so particular robot navigation can be accomplished with improved safety and efficiency. Moreover, cloud-enabled robotics offers new control strategies for cooperative robots. Sharing information in the cloud, cooperative robots take advantage of unified processing of information from multiple sources. As a result, the design and development of novel mobile robot systems hold a benefit from the fusion of a global route map and local path planning, sensor fusion, time synchronization, etc. In [30], the authors emphasized the benefits of sharing and reusing the data independent of specific robot hardware. Leveraging existing standards in an open architecture framework and network protocols, the RoboEarth platform allows any robot with a network connection to generate, share, and reuse data. As the result, combining the cloud service and local knowledge, the platform aims at increasing the speed of the robot learning process and enabling adaptation in various tasks. Implementation is based on a three-layered architecture:  
* Cloud (server) layer that holds the RoboEarth database containing a global world model with information about the objects, environments, actions, etc. * Hardware-independent middle layer that serves as a bridge between global knowledge and robot-specific skills. This layer contains generic components as a part of the local robot's software. * The layer that represents the robot's specific skills. Automation in factory production lines, warehousing and logistic operations is mostly based on AGV utilization with centralized, cloud-based management, usually referred to as warehouse management system (WMS). The role of this system varies according to the type of action and robot capabilities.