Semantic web services for ROS: a Robot as a Service approach

Recently, Robot as a Service (RaaS) brought a major shift in the access and use of robots due to the technological advancements in computing, storage and communication. Users at the client side can manipulate their robots as an on-demand service throughout the Internet. The development of such systems is facing the fusion of the advantages of both Robot Operating System (ROS) and web services. Web services offer loosely coupled ROS software components enabling their interoperability and reuse. However, previous work in this area do not fully describe the service capability and characterization of the offered robotic functionality. In this paper, we propose a semantic description to ROS web services to facilitate their discovery and access in RaaS environment. The representation of ROS Semantic Web Service (ROS-SWS) leverages the ROS components to express its ability through a ROS domain ontology of capabilities and properties. The implemented services and results are presented in this paper.