Woowa Brothers Builds Secure Connection Between Outdoor Delivery Robots and the Cloud with AWS IoT Core

Woowa Brothers has deployed its self-developed outdoor delivery robot Dilly at Gangnam Nonhyeon B Mart since February 2025. Since the robots use cloud resources over an external network, secure registration of multiple robots, communication isolation, and building real-time monitoring infrastructure became key challenges.

For robot registration, AWS IoT Core Fleet Provisioning and Pre-Provisioning Hook were applied. Device certificates are issued only to robots that pass an in-house two-stage verification, achieving zero-touch registration, and registered devices are managed together via Thing Group as well as individual Thing Name and certificate units.

Message isolation between robots is handled through IoT Core Policy and a topic-based Pub/Sub structure. Each robot is restricted to using only its own status and control topics, while the central control server is configured to collect the status of all robots via wildcard subscriptions such as +/topic/status.

To reduce message delivery costs and backend processing load, the AWS IoT Core Rules Engine routes robot status data to Amazon SQS. Data from multiple robots is aggregated into a single subscription and then delivered via Kafka to backend services such as an EC2 Auto Scaling Group or ECS, supporting real-time event utilization.

For cloud resource access, the IoT Core Credential Provider is used. Authenticated robots are issued temporary credentials from AWS IAM Roles separated by resource and by robot, enabling fine-grained access control over Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon CloudWatch.