Amazon Web Services Inc. yesterday announced that its AWS RoboMaker product is now available in the EU, Asia-Pacific, and Eastern U.S., specifically in Frankfurt, Germany; Singapore; and Ohio. RoboMaker “is a service intended to make it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy intelligent robotics at scale,” said Amazon Web Services.

In addition to those locations, AWS RoboMaker is available in Ireland, Northern Virginia, Oregon, and Tokyo, for a total of seven regions globally. “The regional expansion furthers our customers’ ability to build highly-available robotic applications, simulations, and deployments,” said Amazon.

Amazon Web Services launched its offering last November, and it has posted pricing for the new regions.

AWS RoboMaker extends ROS to the cloud

RoboMaker extends the Robot Operating System (ROS), the most widely used open-source robotics software framework, with connectivity to cloud services, said Amazon Web Services.

RoboMaker also provides an environment for robotics application development, a simulation service to accelerate application testing; and a robotics fleet management service for remote application deployment, update, and management.

Features include AWS machine learning services, monitoring services, and analytics services that enable a robot to stream data, navigate, communicate, comprehend, and learn. Earlier this month, Amazon announced support for ROS-Melodic Marena in RoboMaker.

Competitors such as Qualcomm have also offered development platforms, some based on ROS and the cloud, while other companies offer interoperability with RoboMaker, such as Freedom Robotics.

Getting started

Last month, Amazon Web Services hosted a free, hands-on workshop as part of AWS RoboMaker Immersion Day in Boston leading into the Robotics Summit & Expo, which was produced by The Robot Report.

At the Robotics Summit & Expo, keynote speaker Roger Barga, general manager of AWS Robotics and autonomous services at Amazon Web Services, discussed how ROS and the cloud are enabling a new generation of smart robots.

Amazon provides information for getting started on the RoboMaker webpage, as well as a sample simulation job in the RoboMaker console.