Amazon Web Services is rolling out a new cloud service designed to help developers build, test and deploy intelligent robotics applications. The cloud juggernaut said the new AWS RoboMaker service works on top of the open-source robotics middleware Robot Operating System, and extends the framework with connectivity to AWS services for machine learning, monitoring, and analytics. The idea is to give developers a centralized dev environment in the cloud where they can build robotics applications, test them in an open source simulator, and deploy them directly to their robots. Also: Why AWS re:Invent is arguably more important than Amazon's Black Friday, Cyber Monday bonanza "When talking to our customers, we see the same pattern repeated over and again," said Roger Barga, GM of RoboMaker, in a press release. "They spend a lot of time setting up infrastructure and cobbling together software for different stages of the robotics development cycle, repeating work others have done before, leaving less time for innovation."