The provider supplies the customer with robots plus software, integration and support under a subscription or pay-per-use contract (e.g. per operating hour, per completed task, per robot per month). Ownership of the hardware stays with the provider, who monitors fleets and delivers updates, servicing and device replacement. This is often accompanied by a cloud layer (cloud robotics) for fleet orchestration, telemetry and analytics, and in the technical sense - exposing robot functions as services (SOA) integrated with the customer's systems.
Buying, integrating and maintaining robots is a high capital cost and technology risk, which slows automation adoption, especially for smaller companies. RaaS removes the large upfront investment and shifts responsibility for keeping the hardware working onto the provider.
Robots provided to the customer while remaining the provider's property.
Official
Fleet orchestration, telemetry, updates and analytics; integration via API/SOA.
An operating-expense (OpEx) fee for usage: per robot, per operating hour or per completed task.
The provider is responsible for servicing, parts, device replacement and a guaranteed service level.
Official
Because the hardware, software and cloud belong to the provider, migrating or switching providers can be difficult.
With long, intensive use the total subscription fees can exceed the cost of buying the robots outright.
Cloud-based functions (orchestration, telemetry) require reliable connectivity; an outage can affect fleet operation.
The RaaS concept in its technical (SOA / cloud) sense appeared in February 2006 at the 49th IFIP 10.4 Working Groups meeting.
In the late 2010s the RaaS business model (subscription/OpEx) became widespread in warehouse and logistics robots, lowering the barrier to deploying automation.
