Cloud Robotics is the future (Score 1)

The real time simulation of an Atlas walking robot, with its walking controller, Laser scanner and 6 cameras (2 in each hand!) is beyond the capabilities of most ordinary computers. In fact, even the AWS instances were too slow and the contest was actually held on the SoltLayer infrastructure (now IBM), using K10 Tesla gpus and dual Intel Xeon E5-2690-OctoCore [2.9GHz]. The cloud is a good place is good place for simulation, not only because you can get a hundred computers for 1 hour (instead of having to wait 100 hours on a single one), but also because of the vast data sets you will eventually be able to tap into (grasping libraries, objects recognition data sets,etc). There's only a very finite amount of data you can upload and download to your local machine. Running robot simulations in the cloud is a great way to share. Publishing simulations and algorithms so that anyone can try them on a public cloud is much better than trying to get others replicate your local setup with tutorials and instructions. Not to mention the time you don't have to spend installing and configuring software.