Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Applications of cooperative WSN in homecare systems

Cooperation plays the crucial role in shared space of the homecare processes. It is a rather hard task to ensure effective cooperation in home care environment. This is due to variability of schedules, tasks and mobility of both patients and carers. In this paper, we discuss sensor network technology that can facilitate and improve home care cooperation scenarios. We present methodology, recommendations and applications for incorporating a WSN based solution in various areas of Homecare. We argue that even the most difficult areas of cooperation between patients and their carers such as: information retrieval, information dissemination, scheduling, coordination of short and long-term treatment can be supported by WSN based solutions. Finally, we discuss sensor network design approaches for incorporating smart communication devices and sensors to support health care workers and their patients in their daily activities. The network of smart sensors can help to maintain awareness of the activities of all stakeholders and the need to integrate communication and computer technology with the requirements of effective aged care infrastructure. © 2008 IEEE

Smart lighting in multipurpose outdoor environments: energy efficient solution using network of cooperating objects

The first applications for smart environments targeted wellscoped spaces and appliances. These applications were strong drivers to advance Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and the Internet of Things (IoT). With the evolution of the technological base, more complex environments became the new targets. The concept of cooperating objects (CO) enables further advancement of IoT and helps to grasp the multiple aspects of these environments. This paper describes smart lighting application for the multipurpose outdoor environment at the university campus area implemented following the new paradigm. The application is aiming efficient use of energy and future integration with associated industrial systems

Towards a Reference Architecture for Context-Aware Services

This Chapter describes an infrastructure for multi-modal perceptual systems which aims at developing and realizing computer services that are delivered to humans in an implicit and unobtrusive way. The framework presented here supports the implementation of humancentric context-aware applications providing non-obtrusive assistance to participants in events such as meetings, lectures, conferences and presentations taking place in indoor "smart spaces". We emphasize on the design and implementation of an agent-based framework that supports "pluggable" service logic in the sense that the service developer can concentrate on the service logic independently of the underlying middleware. Furthermore, we give an example of the architecture’s ability to support the cooperation of multiple services in a meeting scenario using an intelligent connector service and a semantic web oriented travel service. The framework was developed as part of the project CHIL (Computers in the Human Interaction Loop). The vision of CHIL was to be able to provide context-aware human centric services which will operate in the background, provide assistance to the participants in the CHIL spaces and undertake tedious tasks in an unobtrusive way. To achieve this, significant effort had to be put in designing efficient context extraction components so that the CHIL system can acquire an accurate perspective of the current state of the CHIL space. However, the CHIL services required a much more sophisticated modelling of the actual event, rather than simple and fluctuating impressions of it. Furthermore, by nature the CHIL spaces are highly dynamic and heterogeneous; people join or leave, sensors fail or are restarted, user devices connect to the network, etc. To manage this diverse infrastructure, sophisticated techniques were necessary that can map all entities present in the CHIL system and provide information to all components which may require it. From these facts, one can easily understand that in addition to highly sophisticated components at an individual level, another mechanism (or a combination of mechanisms) should be present which can handle this infrastructure. The CHIL Reference Architecture for Multi Modal Systems lies in the background, and provides the solid, high performance and robust backbone for the CHIL services. Each individual need is assigned to a specially designed and integrated layer which is docked to the individual component, and provides all the necessary actions to enable the component to be plugged in the CHIL framework

Improving the Scalability of DPWS-Based Networked Infrastructures

The Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) specification enables seamless discovery, configuration, and interoperability of networked devices in various settings, ranging from home automation and multimedia to manufacturing equipment and data centers. Unfortunately, the sheer simplicity of event notification mechanisms that makes it fit for resource-constrained devices, makes it hard to scale to large infrastructures with more stringent dependability requirements, ironically, where self-configuration would be most useful. In this report, we address this challenge with a proposal to integrate gossip-based dissemination in DPWS, thus maintaining compatibility with original assumptions of the specification, and avoiding a centralized configuration server or custom black-box middleware components. In detail, we show how our approach provides an evolutionary and non-intrusive solution to the scalability limitations of DPWS and experimentally evaluate it with an implementation based on the the Web Services for Devices (WS4D) Java Multi Edition DPWS Stack (JMEDS).Comment: 28 pages, Technical Repor

A meta-semantic language for smart component-adapters

The issues confronting the software development community today are significantly different from the problems it faced only a decade ago. Advances in software development tools and technologies during the last two decades have greatly enhanced the ability to leverage large amounts of software for creating new applications through the reuse of software libraries and application frameworks. The problems facing organizations today are increasingly focused around systems integration and the creation of information flows. Software modeling based on the assembly of reusable components to support software development has not been successfully implemented on a wide scale. Several models for reusable software components have been suggested which primarily address the wiring-level connectivity problem. While this is considered necessary, it is not sufficient to support an automated process of component assembly. Two critical issues that remain unresolved are: (1) semantic modeling of components, and (2) deployment process that supports automated assembly. The first issue can be addressed through domain-based standardization that would make it possible for independent developers to produce interoperable components based on a common set of vocabulary and understanding of the problem domain. This is important not only for providing a semantic basis for developing components but also for the interoperability between systems. The second issue is important for two reasons: (a) eliminate the need for developers to be involved in the final assembly of software components, and (b) provide a basis for the development process to be potentially driven by the user. To resolve the above remaining issues (1) and (2) a late binding mechanism between components based on meta-protocols is required. In this dissertation we address the above issues by proposing a generic framework for the development of software components and an interconnection language, COMPILE, for the specification of software systems from components. The computational model of the COMPILE language is based on late and dynamic binding of the components\u27 control, data, and function properties. The use of asynchronous callbacks for method invocation allows control binding among components to be late and dynamic. Data exchanged between components is defined through the use of a meta- language that can describe the semantics of the information but without being bound to any specific programming language type representation. Late binding to functions is accomplished by maintaining domain-based semantics as component metainformation. This information allows clients of components to map generic requested service to specific functions

Towards a Reference Architecture for Swarm Intelligence-based Internet of Things

International audienceThe Internet of Things (IoT) represents the global network which interconnects digital and physical entities. It aims at providing objects with intelligence that allows them to perceive, decide and cooperate with other objects, machines, systems and even humans to enable a whole new class of applications and services. Agent-Based Computing paradigm has been exploited to deal with the IoT system development. Many research works focus on making objects able to think by themselves thus imitating human brain. Swarm Intelligence studies the collective behavior of systems composed of many individuals who interact locally with each other and with their environment using decentralized and self-organized control to achieve complex tasks. Swarm intelligence-based systems provide decentralized, self-organized and robust systems with consideration of coordination frameworks. We explore in this paper the exploitation of swarm intelligence-based features in IoT-based systems. Therefore, we present a reference swarm-based architectural model that enables cooperation among devices in IoT systems

An Overview of Centralised Middleware Components for Sensor Networks

Sensors are increasingly becoming part of our daily lives: motion detection, lighting control, environmental monitoring, and keeping track of energy consumption all rely on sensors. Combining data from this wide variety of sensors will result in new and innovative applications. However, access to these sensors – or the networks formed by them – is often provided via proprietary protocols and data formats, thereby obstructing the development of applications. To overcome such issues, middleware components have been employed to provide a universal interface to the sensor networks, hiding vendor-specific details from application developers. The scientific literature contains many descriptions of middleware components for sensor networks, with ideas from various fields of research. Recently, much attention in literature is aimed at what we, in this paper, define as ‘centralised’ middleware components. These components consider sensor networks that have no capacity – in terms of memory, data storage, and cpu power – to run middleware components (partially) on the sensor nodes. Often, viewed from the position of the middleware component, these sensor networks function as simple data providers for applications In this paper we introduce the term ‘centralised’ for such middleware components, guided by a literature review of existing middleware components for sensor networks. We describe their general architecture, give a description of a representative set of four centralised middleware components, and discuss advantages and disadvantages of these components. Finally, we identify directions of further research that will impact centralised middleware systems in the near future