Similar concepts can work on other sorts of systems. State estimators using computable mathematical models of systems can compute the position of a motor shaft from readily-accessible motor winding currents and voltages, or the state of a chemical reaction from external observations. In general, there appears to be a growing trend to favour a small number of remote sensors—often cameras—supported by computing resources, rather than a swarm of simple sensors with their attendant power, connectivity, reliability, and security issues.
That changes everything
The idea of substituting heavy computing algorithms—such as convolutional neural networks or Kalman filters—for clouds of simple sensors has obvious advantages. But it creates problems, too. Designers seem to face a dilemma. Do they preserve the spirit of virtualization by moving the raw data—potentially multiple streams of 4K video—up to the cloud for analysis? Or do they design-in substantial computing power close to the sensors? Both approaches have their challenges and their advocates.
Putting the computing in the cloud has obvious arguments in its favour. You can have as much computing power as you want. If you wish to experiment with big-data algorithms, you can have almost infinite storage. And you only pay for roughly what you use. But there are three categories of challenges: security, latency, and bandwidth.
If your algorithm is highly intolerant of latency, you have no choice but to rely on local computing. But if you can tolerate some latency between sensor input and system response, the question becomes how much, and with how much variation. For example, some control algorithms can accommodate significant latency in the loop, but only if that latency is nearly constant. These issues are obviously not a concern when the amount of data moving to the cloud is small and time is not critical. But if a system design requires moving real-time 4K video from multiple cameras to the cloud, the limitations of the Internet become an issue.