Cyber-physical cloud computing implemented as PaaS

We describe a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) system for performing multi-customer information acquisition missions on unmanned vehicle swarms operated and maintained by a third party. Customers implement their missions completely unaware of each other and the available vehicle infrastructure. Vehicle swarm providers may add or remove vehicles unnoticed by customers for maintenance, recharging, and refueling. To achieve this, we apply the paradigm of cloud computing to virtualized versions of unmanned vehicles. Our implementation allows the simulation of multi-customer information acquisition missions as well as their execution on real hardware running the robot operating system (ROS).