The development of a Service Robotics application is not just a technological problem, but it involves many aspects that must be taken in account: the Human-Robot interaction, the ethical considerations, the ergonomics factors, the technology acceptance models, not to mention the economic and business issues. If a massive introduction of the Service Robotics is the goal, with the transfer of innovations from research and academic labs to our everyday life, all the previous themes must be considered and deeply inspected, with the purpose of developing a 360° view of the different sides of a real (and usable) Application.

This is especially true for Telecommunications Operators that need to take care of some of the most complex factors of the Connected Service Robotics. First of all the Cloud Computing infrastructure, which allows the Cloud Robotics paradigm, where robots are no more limited by onboard computational power, memory and programming, but they can access the rich range of applications and data available in the network in order to increase their functionalities at a fraction of the cost. Then the Internet of Things, which allows the seamless exchange of information between machines by means of new standardized protocols. And last, but not least, the new broadband wireless network provided by the 4G technology, which can provide to robots communications at a very high data transfer speed (both downlink, and uplink), and with a very low latency.

Since a failure in the aforementioned aspects may compromise the work spent in solving the complex communications issues, a Telecommunications Operator has great interest in finding competencies for coping with these themes which are outside the traditional telecommunications boundaries. This is the reason why Telecom Italia started many collaborations with the academia and is equipping itself to get ready to support future third-party robot applications programmers by developing a network platform, based on the Cloud Computing infrastructure, exposing Application Programming Interfaces based on “robot-independent” frameworks.