Cloud Automation © ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/SORBETTO Precomputing Roadmaps for Flexible Manipulation By Kostas E. Bekris, Rahul Shome, Athanasios Krontiris, and Andrew Dobson T he goal of this article is to highlight the benefits of cloud automation for industrial adopters and some of the research challenges that must be addressed in this process. The focus is on the use of cloud computing for efficiently planning the motion of new robot manipulators designed for flexible manufacturing floors. In particular, different ways that a robot can interact with a computing cloud are considered, Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2015.2401291 Date of publication: 18 June 2015 1070-9932/15©2015IEEE where an architecture that splits computation between the remote cloud and the robot appears advantageous. Given this synergistic robot-cloud architecture, this article describes how solutions from the recent literature can be employed on the cloud during a periodically updated preprocessing phase to efficiently answer manipulation queries on the robot given changes in the workspace. In this setup, interesting tradeoffs arise between path quality and computational efficiency, which are evaluated through simulation. These tradeoffs motivate further research on how motion planning should be executed given access to a computing cloud. JUNE 2015 * IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE * 41http://www.ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/SORBETTO