  Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to enable a myriad of applications by
interconnecting objects - such as sensors and robots - over the Internet. IoT
applications range from healthcare to autonomous vehicles and include disaster
management. Enabling these applications in cloud environments requires the
design of appropriate IoT Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IoT IaaS) to ease the
provisioning of the IoT objects as cloud services. This paper discusses a case
study on search and rescue IoT applications in large-scale disaster scenarios.
It proposes an IoT IaaS architecture that virtualizes robots (IaaS for robots)
and provides them to the upstream applications as-a-Service. Node- and
Network-level robots virtualization are supported. The proposed architecture
meets a set of identified requirements, such as the need for a unified
description model for heterogeneous robots, publication/discovery mechanism,
and federation with other IaaS for robots when needed. A validating proof of
concept is built and experiments are made to evaluate its performance. Lessons
learned and prospective research directions are discussed.
