AWS RoboMaker Expands to New Regions Worldwide for Robotics Developers

Source: therobotreport.com. Original announcement dated July 2019.

AWS RoboMaker Reaches Seven Global Regions

Amazon Web Services announced that AWS RoboMaker expanded into three additional regions: Frankfurt (EU), Singapore (Asia-Pacific), and Ohio (Eastern US). Combined with existing availability in Ireland, Northern Virginia, Oregon, and Tokyo, the service became accessible across seven AWS regions worldwide.

According to Amazon, the regional expansion was designed to give customers greater flexibility to build highly available robotic applications, run distributed simulations, and manage fleet deployments closer to where their robots operate. AWS RoboMaker had originally launched in November 2018, and pricing for the newly added regions was published alongside this announcement.

What Is AWS RoboMaker?

AWS RoboMaker is a managed cloud service designed to simplify the full lifecycle of intelligent robotics software: development, simulation, and deployment at scale. The service is built on top of the Robot Operating System (ROS), the most widely adopted open-source robotics middleware framework, and extends it with native connectivity to AWS cloud services.

The platform consists of three primary components:

• Development environment: A cloud-based IDE pre-configured with ROS, build tools, and AWS SDK integrations, so teams can write and iterate on robotics application code without managing local toolchains.
• Simulation service: A scalable simulation environment that lets developers run parallel simulation jobs to accelerate testing and validation of robot behaviours before deploying to physical hardware.
• Fleet management: A service for remotely deploying, updating, and managing robotics applications across a fleet of physical devices.

AWS RoboMaker Extends ROS to the Cloud

One of the core value propositions of AWS RoboMaker is bridging ROS-based development with managed AWS cloud services. Robotics applications built on RoboMaker can integrate capabilities such as:

• Machine learning: Integration with AWS ML services enables robots to perform tasks like object recognition and natural language understanding.
• Monitoring and analytics: Robots can stream operational telemetry to AWS for analysis and alerting.
• Navigation and communication: Cloud connectivity supports map storage, path planning data, and inter-device messaging.

Around the time of the regional expansion, Amazon also announced support for ROS Melodic Morenia within RoboMaker, keeping the platform aligned with the latest stable ROS release available at the time.

AWS RoboMaker operates in a competitive landscape that includes robotics development platforms from other vendors. Companies such as Qualcomm offered cloud-connected robotics development platforms, some also built on ROS, while third-party providers like Freedom Robotics announced interoperability with RoboMaker for fleet monitoring use cases.

Community Engagement and Getting Started

Ahead of the Robotics Summit & Expo, Amazon Web Services hosted a free, hands-on workshop as part of an AWS RoboMaker Immersion Day in Boston. The event gave developers practical experience with the platform before the broader industry conference, which was produced by The Robot Report.

At the Robotics Summit & Expo, Roger Barga, then General Manager of AWS Robotics and Autonomous Services, delivered a keynote discussing how ROS combined with cloud infrastructure is enabling a new generation of intelligent, connected robots.

Developers looking to get started with AWS RoboMaker can access documentation, tutorials, and a sample simulation job directly through the AWS RoboMaker product page and the RoboMaker console.

Summary: AWS RoboMaker Region Availability (as of July 2019)

Note: AWS regularly adds new region support. Check the official AWS RoboMaker page for the current list of supported regions.