8,491 research outputs found
On the Integration of Adaptive and Interactive Robotic Smart Spaces
© 2015 Mauro Dragone et al.. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)Enabling robots to seamlessly operate as part of smart spaces is an important and extended challenge for robotics R&D and a key enabler for a range of advanced robotic applications, such as AmbientAssisted Living (AAL) and home automation. The integration of these technologies is currently being pursued from two largely distinct view-points: On the one hand, people-centred initiatives focus on improving the user’s acceptance by tackling human-robot interaction (HRI) issues, often adopting a social robotic approach, and by giving to the designer and - in a limited degree – to the final user(s), control on personalization and product customisation features. On the other hand, technologically-driven initiatives are building impersonal but intelligent systems that are able to pro-actively and autonomously adapt their operations to fit changing requirements and evolving users’ needs,but which largely ignore and do not leverage human-robot interaction and may thus lead to poor user experience and user acceptance. In order to inform the development of a new generation of smart robotic spaces, this paper analyses and compares different research strands with a view to proposing possible integrated solutions with both advanced HRI and online adaptation capabilities.Peer reviewe
Living In A Prototype: A Reconfigured Space
In this paper, we present a twenty-three months autobiographical design project of converting a Mercedes Sprinter van into a camper van. This project allows us to investigate the complexities and nuances of a case where people engage in a process of making, transforming and adapting a space they live in. This example opens a radically different and productive context for revisiting concepts that are currently at the center of human-computer interaction (HCI) research: ubiquitous computing, home automation, smart homes, and the Internet of Things. We offer six qualities characterizing the evolving relationship between the makers and the lived-in environment: the van. We conclude with a discussion on the two themes of living in a reconfigured home and prototype qualities in a reconfigured space, and a critical reflection around the theme of the invariably unfinished home
Narrative based Postdictive Reasoning for Cognitive Robotics
Making sense of incomplete and conflicting narrative knowledge in the
presence of abnormalities, unobservable processes, and other real world
considerations is a challenge and crucial requirement for cognitive robotics
systems. An added challenge, even when suitably specialised action languages
and reasoning systems exist, is practical integration and application within
large-scale robot control frameworks.
In the backdrop of an autonomous wheelchair robot control task, we report on
application-driven work to realise postdiction triggered abnormality detection
and re-planning for real-time robot control: (a) Narrative-based knowledge
about the environment is obtained via a larger smart environment framework; and
(b) abnormalities are postdicted from stable-models of an answer-set program
corresponding to the robot's epistemic model. The overall reasoning is
performed in the context of an approximate epistemic action theory based
planner implemented via a translation to answer-set programming.Comment: Commonsense Reasoning Symposium, Ayia Napa, Cyprus, 201
A Tailored Smart Home for Dementia Care
Dementia refers to a group of chronic conditions that cause the permanent and gradual cognitive decline. Therefore, a Person with Dementia (PwD) requires constant care from various classes of caregivers. The care costs of PwDs bear a tremendous burden on healthcare systems around the world. It is commonly accepted that utilising Smart Homes (SH), as an instance of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies, can facilitate the care, and consequently improve the quality of PwDs well-being. Nevertheless, most of the existing platforms assume dementia care is a straight application of standard SH technology without accommodating the specific requirements of dementia care. A consequence of this approach is the inadequacy and unacceptability of generic SH systems in the context of dementia care. Contrary to most of the existing SH systems proposed for dementia care, this study considers the specific requirements of PwDs and their care circle in all development steps of an SH. In addition, it investigates how utilising novel design and computing approaches can enhance the quality of SHs for dementia care. To do so, the requirements of dementia care stakeholders are collected, analysed and reflected on in an SH system design. Extensions and adaptation of existing frameworks and technologies are proposed to implement a prototype based on the resulting design. Finally, thorough evaluations and validation of the prototype are carried out. The evaluations by a group of stakeholders show the suitability of the proposed methodology and consequently the resulting prototypes for reducing dementia care difficulties as well as its potential for deployment in the real-world environment
Equipment management trial : final report
Executive Summary
The Equipment Management (EM) trial was one of the practical initiatives conceived and
implemented by members of The Application Home Initiative (TAHI) to demonstrate the
feasibility of interoperability between white and brown goods, and other domestic equipment.
The trial ran from October 2002 to June 2005, over which period it achieved its core
objectives through the deployment in early 2005 of an integrated system in trials in 15
occupied homes. Prior to roll out into the field, the work was underpinned by soak testing,
validation, laboratory experiments, case studies, user questionnaires, simulations and other
research, conducted in a single demonstration home in Loughborough, as well as in
Universities in the East Midlands and Scotland.
Throughout its life, the trial faced significant membership changes, which had a far greater
impact than the technical issues that were tackled. Two blue chip companies withdrew at the
point of signing the collaborative agreement; another made a major change in strategic
direction half way through and withdrew the major portion of its backing; another corporate left
at this point, a second one later; one corporate was a late entrant; the technical leader made
a boardroom decision not to do the engineering work that it had promised; one company went
into liquidation; another went up for sale whilst others reorganised. The trial was conducted
against this backdrop of continual commercial change. Despite this difficult operating
environment, the trial met its objectives, although not entirely as envisaged initially – a tribute
to the determination of the trial’s membership, the strength of its formal governance and
management processes, and especially, the financial support of the dti.
The equipment on trial featured a central heating/hot water boiler, washing machine, security
system, gas alarm and utility meters, all connected to a home gateway, integrated functionally
and presented to the users via a single interface.
The trial met its principal objective to show that by connecting appliances to each other and to
a support system, benefits in remote condition monitoring, maintenance, appliance & home
controls optimisation and convenience to the customer & service supplier could be provided.
This is one of two main reports that form the trial output (the other, the Multi Home Trial
Report, is available to EM Trial members only as it contains commercially sensitive
information). A supporting library of documents is also available and is held in the virtual
office hosted by Loughborough University Centre for the Integrated Home Environment
Designing Smart Cities: A Participatory Approach to Business Model Teaching
This paper presents the design and content of a business model course for executive education. The course is inspired by the Scandinavian participatory design approach, which invites cross-disciplinary and interactive engagement. It demonstrates how a situated learning experience enables a contextual process of inquiry among participant
Named data networking for efficient IoT-based disaster management in a smart campus
Disasters are uncertain occasions that can impose a drastic impact on human life and building infrastructures. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays a vital role in coping with such situations by enabling and integrating multiple technological resources to develop Disaster Management Systems (DMSs). In this context, a majority of the existing DMSs use networking architectures based upon the Internet Protocol (IP) focusing on location-dependent communications. However, IP-based communications face the limitations of inefficient bandwidth utilization, high processing, data security, and excessive memory intake. To address these issues, Named Data Networking (NDN) has emerged as a promising communication paradigm, which is based on the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architecture. An NDN is among the self-organizing communication networks that reduces the complexity of networking systems in addition to provide content security. Given this, many NDN-based DMSs have been proposed. The problem with the existing NDN-based DMS is that they use a PULL-based mechanism that ultimately results in higher delay and more energy consumption. In order to cater for time-critical scenarios, emergence-driven network engineering communication and computation models are required. In this paper, a novel DMS is proposed, i.e., Named Data Networking Disaster Management (NDN-DM), where a producer forwards a fire alert message to neighbouring consumers. This makes the nodes converge according to the disaster situation in a more efficient and secure way. Furthermore, we consider a fire scenario in a university campus and mobile nodes in the campus collaborate with each other to manage the fire situation. The proposed framework has been mathematically modeled and formally proved using timed automata-based transition systems and a real-time model checker, respectively. Additionally, the evaluation of the proposed NDM-DM has been performed using NS2. The results prove that the proposed scheme has reduced the end-to-end delay up from 2% to 10% and minimized up to 20% energy consumption, as energy improved from 3% to 20% compared with a state-of-the-art NDN-based DMS
VetIoT: On Vetting IoT Defenses Enforcing Policies at Runtime
Smart homes are powered by numerous programmable IoT platforms. Despite
tremendous innovations, these platforms often suffer from safety and security
issues. One class of defense solutions dynamically enforces safety and security
policies, which essentially capture the expected behavior of the IoT system.
While many proposed works were built on this runtime approach, they all are
under-vetted. The primary reason lies in their evaluation approach. They are
mostly self-evaluated in isolation using a virtual testbed combined with
manually orchestrated test scenarios that rely on user interactions with the
platform's UI. Such hand-crafted and non-uniform evaluation setups are limiting
not only the reproducibility but also a comparative analysis of their efficacy
results. Closing this gap in the traditional way requires a huge upfront manual
effort, which causes the researchers turn away from any large-scale comparative
empirical evaluation. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a highly-automated
uniform evaluation platform, dubbed VetIoT, to vet the defense solutions that
hinge on runtime policy enforcement. Given a defense solution, VetIoT easily
instantiates a virtual testbed inside which the solution is empirically
evaluated. VetIoT replaces manual UI-based interactions with an automated event
simulator and manual inspection of test outcomes with an automated comparator.
We developed a fully-functional prototype of VetIoT and applied it on three
runtime policy enforcement solutions: Expat, Patriot, and IoTguard. VetIoT
reproduced their individual prior results and assessed their efficacy results
via stress testing and differential testing. We believe VetIoT can foster
future research/evaluation.Comment: Accepted at the IEEE Conference on Communications and Network
Security (CNS) 202
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