Amazon recently announced the preview of AWS IoT RoboRunner, a new service to help businesses build and deploy robotic management applications. Developed from technology already used in Amazon warehouses, IoT RoboRunner provides infrastructure to connect fleets of robots and automation software.

The new service orchestrates work across operations, managing data types like location and robotic task data in a central repository. Channy Yun, lead developer advocate at AWS, explains how the new service can help bot operators:

Many customers choose different types of robots, often from different vendors in the same installation. Bot operators want access to the unified data needed to build apps that run on a fleet of bots. However, when a new robot is added to an autonomous operation, complex and time-consuming software integration work is required to connect robot control software to work management systems.

Connect robots and different work management systems with the Fleet manager and Task Manager libraries, the new service can orchestrate work through a single system view and address interoperability issues. Chip Childers, lead architect at Puppet, tweet:

The purpose of AWS IoT RoboRunner is to facilitate and accelerate the development of applications for robots and robot fleets. A lot of capital is flowing to startups that focus on fleet management, but I don’t see enough focus on delivering software to deployed devices.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/preview-aws-iot-roborunner-for-building-robot-fleet-management-applications

Multi-robot collaboration, health monitoring, and space management are among the suggested use cases for the new service. Developers can use IoT RoboRunner APIs to integrate new bot providers and build management applications: once custom task manager code has been developed and tested, it can be deployed as a Lambda function , while fleet manager gateway code can run as IoT Greengrass. making up.

Amazon has written four RoboRunner tutorials to develop a custom task manager for fleet orchestration, develop a gateway that serves as a message routing layer, read robot and task status, and create a mission to monitor robot states. The centralized data repository includes three registers storing types of data: vehicle/fleet register, destination register and task register.

AWS IoT RoboRunner is an eventually consistent system and is available for preview in the us-east-1 and eu-central-1 regions. There is no additional charge to use the new service during the preview period.