RaaS can be considered a unit of the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Intelligent Things (IoIT) that deal with intelligent devices that have adequate computing capacity,[3] Cyber-physical system (CPS) that is a combination of a large computational and communication core and physical elements that can interact with the physical world,[4] and Autonomous decentralized system (ADS) whose components are designed to operate in a loosely coupled manner and data are shared through a content-oriented protocol.
RaaS is differentiated from a lease contract in that the original manufacturer continues to own the physical robotic device and carries the machine as an asset on its books.
The initial design and implementation of applying service-oriented computing in embedded systems and robots was presented in the 49th IFIP 10.4 Workgroups meeting in February 2006.
The major challenge in designing RaaS is to deal with the diversity of the networks, applications, and the environments or end users.
In cloud computing, the network and communication protocols are limited to a few standards such WSDL, SOAP, HTTP, and RESTful architecture.
In RaaS, HTTP, SOAP, and WSDL standards and robotics applications are the main design considerations.
RaaS uses existing services to compose different applications at workflow level, which significantly reduce the learning curve of robotics programming.