Cloud Robotik: Ein Kubernetes-basierter Ansatz zu Cloud-Edge Integration

The shift towards eCommerce and increased consumer demand for customized products and services along with hardware-related improvements, has been driving significant changes in supply-chain processes. To cope with those different challenges, especially in shop floors, warehouses, and increasingly in logistics, automation and collaborative robotics increasingly gain relevance to increase agility and productivity in these domains. Robotic automation is being held back by the complexity and effort of custom system integration, which is time-consuming and expensive. Today only 20–30% of manufacturing or logistics operations are automated. We believe that the current Industrie 4.0 initiatives at SAP and Cloud Robotics have the potential to make automation drastically faster and cheaper. While SAP’s engagement in the German Industrie 4.0 Platform is being realized through the Asset Administration Shell implementation to provide an easy way to integrate assets to business processes, Cloud Robotics complements this with a new form of integrating autonomous robots into logistics processes. In May 2019, Google released Google’s Cloud Robotics Core, an open, cloud-based automation platform for robotics hardware manufacturers, integrators, and software developers. SAP’s focus is the orchestration of robots from different vendors as a fleet for a variety of logistics processes and SAP also released the necessary extensions to work with Google’s Cloud Robotics as open source packages. Cloud Robotics enables users of SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) to quickly deploy and integrate autonomous warehouse robots into their operations and scale ad-hoc. This article justifies why autonomous robots require a different integration with business applications and describes a new technological foundation for Cloud-Edge-Integration. Subsequently it introduces Cloud Robotics as a solution, compares this with other robotic platforms and describes an implementation.