Abstract
The articles in this special section focus on the use of cloud computing in the robotics industry. The Internet and the availability of vast computational resources, ever-growing data and storage capacity have the potential to define a new paradigm for robotics and automation. An intelligent system connected to the Internet can expand its onboard local data, computation and sensors with huge data repositories from similar and very different domains, massive parallel computation from server farms and sensor/actuator streams from other robots and automata. It is the potential and also the research challenges of the field that become the focus on this special section. The goal is to group together and to show the state-of-the-art of this newly emerged field, identify the relevant advances and topics, point out the current lines of research and potential applications, and discuss the main research challenges and future work directions.