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

Advancing IoT Platforms Interoperability

The IoT European Platforms Initiative (IoT-EPI) projects are addressing the topic of Internet of Things and Platforms for Connected Smart Objects and aim to deliver an IoT extended into a web of platforms for connected devices and objects that supports smart environments, businesses, services and persons with dynamic and adaptive configuration capabilities. The specific areas of focus of the research activities are architectures and semantic interoperability, which reliably cover multiple use cases. The goal is to deliver dynamically-configured infrastructure and integration platforms for connected smart objects covering multiple technologies and multiple intelligent artefacts. The IoT-EPI ecosystem has been created with the objective of increasing the impact of the IoT-related European research and innovation, including seven European promising projects on IoT platforms: AGILE, BIG IoT, INTER-IoT, VICINITY, SymbIoTe, bIoTope, and TagItSmart.This white paper provides an insight regarding interoperability in the IoT platforms and ecosystems created and used by IoT-EPI. The scope of this document covers the interoperability aspects, challenges and approaches that cope with interoperability in the current existing IoT platforms and presents some insights regarding the future of interoperability in this context. It presents possible solutions, and a possible IoT interoperability platform architecture

Advancing IoT Platforms Interoperability

The IoT European Platforms Initiative (IoT-EPI) projects are addressing the topic of Internet of Things and Platforms for Connected Smart Objects and aim to deliver an IoT extended into a web of platforms for connected devices and objects that supports smart environments, businesses, services and persons with dynamic and adaptive configuration capabilities. The specific areas of focus of the research activities are architectures and semantic interoperability, which reliably cover multiple use cases. The goal is to deliver dynamically-configured infrastructure and integration platforms for connected smart objects covering multiple technologies and multiple intelligent artefacts. The IoT-EPI ecosystem has been created with the objective of increasing the impact of the IoT-related European research and innovation, including seven European promising projects on IoT platforms: AGILE, BIG IoT, INTER-IoT, VICINITY, SymbIoTe, bIoTope, and TagItSmart.This white paper provides an insight regarding interoperability in the IoT platforms and ecosystems created and used by IoT-EPI. The scope of this document covers the interoperability aspects, challenges and approaches that cope with interoperability in the current existing IoT platforms and presents some insights regarding the future of interoperability in this context. It presents possible solutions, and a possible IoT interoperability platform architecture

Internet of Things Strategic Research Roadmap

Internet of Things (IoT) is an integrated part of Future Internet including existing and evolving Internet and network developments and could be conceptually defined as a dynamic global network infrastructure with self configuring capabilities based on standard and interoperable communication protocols where physical and virtual “things” have identities, physical attributes, and virtual personalities, use intelligent interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information network

Embracing the future Internet of Things

All of the objects in the real world are envisioned to be connected and/or represented, through an infrastructure layer, in the virtual world of the Internet, becoming Things with status information. Services are then using the available data from this Internet-of-Things (IoT) for various social and economical benefits which explain its extreme broad usage in very heterogeneous fields. Domain administrations of diverse areas of application developed and deployed their own IoT systems and services following disparate standards and architecture approaches that created a fragmentation of things, infrastructures and services in vertical IoT silos. Coordination and cooperation among IoT systems are the keys to build “smarter” IoT services boosting the benefits magnitude. This article analyses the technical trends of the future IoT world based on the current limitations of the IoT systems and the capability requirements. We propose a hyper-connected IoT framework in which “things” are connected to multiple interdependent services and describe how this framework enables the development of future applications. Moreover, we discuss the major limitations in today’s IoT and highlight the required capabilities in the future. We illustrate this global vision with the help of two concrete instances of the hyper-connected IoT in smart cities and autonomous driving scenarios. Finally, we analyse the trends in the number of connected “things” and point out open issues and future challenges. The proposed hyper-connected IoT framework is meant to scale the benefits of IoT from local to global

A Survey on the Web of Things

The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm was proposed first in the late 2000s, with the idea of leveraging Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices. More than ten years later, the fragmentation of the IoT landscape has dramatically increased as a consequence of the exponential growth of connected devices, making interoperability one of the key issues for most IoT deployments. Contextually, many studies have demonstrated the applicability of Web technologies on IoT scenarios, while the joint efforts from the academia and the industry have led to the proposals of standard specifications for developing WoT systems. Through a systematic review of the literature, we provide a detailed illustration of the WoT paradigm for both researchers and newcomers, by reconstructing the temporal evolution of key concepts and the historical trends, providing an in-depth taxonomy of software architectures and enabling technologies of WoT deployments and, finally, discussing the maturity of WoT vertical markets. Moreover, we identify some future research directions that may open the way to further innovation on WoT systems

Integration of utilities infrastructures in a future internet enabled smart city framework

Improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities are the main drivers of the smart city concept. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a crucial role in making cities smarter, more accessible and more open. In this paper we present a novel architecture exploiting major concepts from the Future Internet (FI) paradigm addressing the challenges that need to be overcome when creating smarter cities. This architecture takes advantage of both the critical communications infrastructures already in place and owned by the utilities as well as of the infrastructure belonging to the city municipalities to accelerate efficient provision of existing and new city services. The paper highlights how FI technologies create the necessary glue and logic that allows the integration of current vertical and isolated city services into a holistic solution, which enables a huge forward leap for the efficiency and sustainability of our cities. Moreover, the paper describes a real-world prototype, that instantiates the aforementioned architecture, deployed in one of the parks of the city of Santander providing an autonomous public street lighting adaptation service. This prototype is a showcase on how added-value services can be seamlessly created on top of the proposed architecture.The work described in this paper has been carried out under the framework of the OUTSMART project which has been partially funded by the European Commission under the contract number FP7-ICT-28503

An interoperability framework for pervasive computing systems

Communication and interaction between smart devices is the foundation for pervasive computing and the Internet of Things. Pervasive platforms, that support developers in building new services and applications, have been extensively researched in the past. Nowadays, a multitude of heterogeneous pervasive platforms exist. In real-world deployments, this leads to the formation of platform-specific silos. Therefore, the need for interoperability between such platforms arises. This thesis presents a framework which addresses all elaborated issues preventing co-operation between different platforms and allows for extension and customisation of different aspects, including platforms and transformation mechanisms. The framework bases on uniform abstractions that support translations of different features. The transformation model provides an automatic as well as a manual transformation mechanism. For evaluation, a prototype is implemented and assessed, providing support for six distinct platforms. Particularly, the framework’s feasibility is demonstrated with three realistic scenario implementations, an effort evaluation, and a cost evaluation

Towards Data Sharing across Decentralized and Federated IoT Data Analytics Platforms

In the past decade the Internet-of-Things concept has overwhelmingly entered all of the fields where data are produced and processed, thus, resulting in a plethora of IoT platforms, typically cloud-based, that centralize data and services management. In this scenario, the development of IoT services in domains such as smart cities, smart industry, e-health, automotive, are possible only for the owner of the IoT deployments or for ad-hoc business one-to-one collaboration agreements. The realization of "smarter" IoT services or even services that are not viable today envisions a complete data sharing with the usage of multiple data sources from multiple parties and the interconnection with other IoT services. In this context, this work studies several aspects of data sharing focusing on Internet-of-Things. We work towards the hyperconnection of IoT services to analyze data that goes beyond the boundaries of a single IoT system. This thesis presents a data analytics platform that: i) treats data analytics processes as services and decouples their management from the data analytics development; ii) decentralizes the data management and the execution of data analytics services between fog, edge and cloud; iii) federates peers of data analytics platforms managed by multiple parties allowing the design to scale into federation of federations; iv) encompasses intelligent handling of security and data usage control across the federation of decentralized platforms instances to reduce data and service management complexity. The proposed solution is experimentally evaluated in terms of performances and validated against use cases. Further, this work adopts and extends available standards and open sources, after an analysis of their capabilities, fostering an easier acceptance of the proposed framework. We also report efforts to initiate an IoT services ecosystem among 27 cities in Europe and Korea based on a novel methodology. We believe that this thesis open a viable path towards a hyperconnection of IoT data and services, minimizing the human effort to manage it, but leaving the full control of the data and service management to the users' will

Digitising the Industry Internet of Things Connecting the Physical, Digital and VirtualWorlds

This book provides an overview of the current Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, ranging from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies in a global context. A successful deployment of IoT technologies requires integration on all layers, be it cognitive and semantic aspects, middleware components, services, edge devices/machines and infrastructures. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC - Internet of Things European Research Cluster from research to technological innovation, validation and deployment. The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster and the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT-EPI) and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, innovation, development and deployment of IoT in the next years. The IoT is bridging the physical world with virtual world and requires sound information processing capabilities for the "digital shadows" of these real things. The research and innovation in nanoelectronics, semiconductor, sensors/actuators, communication, analytics technologies, cyber-physical systems, software, swarm intelligent and deep learning systems are essential for the successful deployment of IoT applications. The emergence of IoT platforms with multiple functionalities enables rapid development and lower costs by offering standardised components that can be shared across multiple solutions in many industry verticals. The IoT applications will gradually move from vertical, single purpose solutions to multi-purpose and collaborative applications interacting across industry verticals, organisations and people, being one of the essential paradigms of the digital economy. Many of those applications still have to be identified and involvement of end-users including the creative sector in this innovation is crucial. The IoT applications and deployments as integrated building blocks of the new digital economy are part of the accompanying IoT policy framework to address issues of horizontal nature and common interest (i.e. privacy, end-to-end security, user acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues) for providing trusted IoT solutions in a coordinated and consolidated manner across the IoT activities and pilots. In this, context IoT ecosystems offer solutions beyond a platform and solve important technical challenges in the different verticals and across verticals. These IoT technology ecosystems are instrumental for the deployment of large pilots and can easily be connected to or build upon the core IoT solutions for different applications in order to expand the system of use and allow new and even unanticipated IoT end uses. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Digitising industry and IoT as key enabler in the new era of Digital Economy• IoT Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• IoT in the digital industrial context: Digital Single Market• Integration of heterogeneous systems and bridging the virtual, digital and physical worlds• Federated IoT platforms and interoperability• Evolution from intelligent devices to connected systems of systems by adding new layers of cognitive behaviour, artificial intelligence and user interfaces.• Innovation through IoT ecosystems• Trust-based IoT end-to-end security, privacy framework• User acceptance, societal, ethical aspects and legal issues• Internet of Things Application