Intelligent Association Exploration and Exploitation of Fuzzy Agents in Ambient Intelligent Environments

This paper presents a novel fuzzy-based intelligent architecture that aims to find relevant and important associations between embedded-agent based services that form Ambient Intelligent Environments (AIEs). The embedded agents are used in two ways; first they monitor the inhabitants of the AIE, learning their behaviours in an online, non-intrusive and life-long fashion with the aim of pre-emptively setting the environment to the users preferred state. Secondly, they evaluate the relevance and significance of the associations to various services with the aim of eliminating redundant associations in order to minimize the agent computational latency within the AIE. The embedded agents employ fuzzy-logic due to its robustness to the uncertainties, noise and imprecision encountered in AIEs. We describe unique real world experiments that were conducted in the Essex intelligent Dormitory (iDorm) to evaluate and validate the significance of the proposed architecture and methods

Robotic ubiquitous cognitive ecology for smart homes

Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them both autonomous and adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The project RUBICON develops learning solutions which yield cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, machine learning, planning and agent- based control, and wireless sensor networks. This paper illustrates the innovations advanced by RUBICON in each of these fronts before describing how the resulting techniques have been integrated and applied to a smart home scenario. The resulting system is able to provide useful services and pro-actively assist the users in their activities. RUBICON learns through an incremental and progressive approach driven by the feed- back received from its own activities and from the user, while also self-organizing the manner in which it uses available sensors, actuators and other functional components in the process. This paper summarises some of the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outlines promising directions for future work

Towards FollowMe User Profiles for Macro Intelligent Environments

We envision an Ambient Intelligent Environment as an environment with technology embedded within the framework of that environment to help enhance an users experience in that environment. Existing implementations , while working effectively, are themselves an expensive and time consuming investment. Applying the same expertise to an environment on a monolithic scale is very inefficient, and thus, will require a different approach. In this paper, we present this problem, propose theoretical solutions that would solve this problem, with the guise of experimentally verifying and comparing these approaches, as well as a formal method to model the entire scenario

Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination

Background: The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e. g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate. The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data. Methods: The developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability. Results: A prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered. Conclusions: The OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results

Integrating an agent-based wireless sensor network within an existing multi-agent condition monitoring system

The use of wireless sensor networks for condition monitoring is gaining ground across all sectors of industry, and while their use for power engineering applications has yet been limited, they represent a viable platform for next-generation substation condition monitoring systems. For engineers to fully benefit from this new approach to condition monitoring, new sensor data must be incorporated into a single integrated system. This paper proposes the integration of an agent-based wireless sensor network with an existing agent-based condition monitoring system. It demonstrates that multi-agent systems can be extended down to the sensor level while considering the reduced energy availability of low-power embedded devices. A novel agent-based approach to data translation is presented, which is demonstrated through two case studies: a lab-based temperature and vibration monitoring system, and a proposal to integrate a wireless sensor network to an existing technology demonstrator deployed in a substation in the UK

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