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

A Role-Based Approach for Orchestrating Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned as a global network of connected things enabling ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. With estimations of billions of sensors and devices to be connected in the coming years, the IoT has been advocated as having a great potential to impact the way we live, but also how we work. However, the connectivity aspect in itself only accounts for the underlying M2M infrastructure. In order to properly support engineering IoT systems and applications, it is key to orchestrate heterogeneous 'things' in a seamless, adaptive and dynamic manner, such that the system can exhibit a goal-directed behaviour and take appropriate actions. Yet, this form of interaction between things needs to take a user-centric approach and by no means elude the users' requirements. To this end, contextualisation is an important feature of the system, allowing it to infer user activities and prompt the user with relevant information and interactions even in the absence of intentional commands. In this work we propose a role-based model for emergent configurations of connected systems as a means to model, manage, and reason about IoT systems including the user's interaction with them. We put a special focus on integrating the user perspective in order to guide the emergent configurations such that systems goals are aligned with the users' intentions. We discuss related scientific and technical challenges and provide several uses cases outlining the concept of emergent configurations.Comment: In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on the Internet of Agents @AAMAS201

A survey of self organisation in future cellular networks

This article surveys the literature over the period of the last decade on the emerging field of self organisation as applied to wireless cellular communication networks. Self organisation has been extensively studied and applied in adhoc networks, wireless sensor networks and autonomic computer networks; however in the context of wireless cellular networks, this is the first attempt to put in perspective the various efforts in form of a tutorial/survey. We provide a comprehensive survey of the existing literature, projects and standards in self organising cellular networks. Additionally, we also aim to present a clear understanding of this active research area, identifying a clear taxonomy and guidelines for design of self organising mechanisms. We compare strength and weakness of existing solutions and highlight the key research areas for further development. This paper serves as a guide and a starting point for anyone willing to delve into research on self organisation in wireless cellular communication networks

Survey of Inter-satellite Communication for Small Satellite Systems: Physical Layer to Network Layer View

Small satellite systems enable whole new class of missions for navigation, communications, remote sensing and scientific research for both civilian and military purposes. As individual spacecraft are limited by the size, mass and power constraints, mass-produced small satellites in large constellations or clusters could be useful in many science missions such as gravity mapping, tracking of forest fires, finding water resources, etc. Constellation of satellites provide improved spatial and temporal resolution of the target. Small satellite constellations contribute innovative applications by replacing a single asset with several very capable spacecraft which opens the door to new applications. With increasing levels of autonomy, there will be a need for remote communication networks to enable communication between spacecraft. These space based networks will need to configure and maintain dynamic routes, manage intermediate nodes, and reconfigure themselves to achieve mission objectives. Hence, inter-satellite communication is a key aspect when satellites fly in formation. In this paper, we present the various researches being conducted in the small satellite community for implementing inter-satellite communications based on the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model. This paper also reviews the various design parameters applicable to the first three layers of the OSI model, i.e., physical, data link and network layer. Based on the survey, we also present a comprehensive list of design parameters useful for achieving inter-satellite communications for multiple small satellite missions. Specific topics include proposed solutions for some of the challenges faced by small satellite systems, enabling operations using a network of small satellites, and some examples of small satellite missions involving formation flying aspects.Comment: 51 pages, 21 Figures, 11 Tables, accepted in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

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

Secure communication using dynamic VPN provisioning in an Inter-Cloud environment

Most of the current cloud computing platforms offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, which aims to provision basic virtualised computing resources as on-demand and dynamic services. Nevertheless, a single cloud does not have limitless resources to offer to its users, hence the notion of an Inter-Cloud enviroment where a cloud can use the infrastructure resources of other clouds. However, there is no common framework in existence that allows the srevice owners to seamlessly provision even some basic services across multiple cloud service providers, albeit not due to any inherent incompatibility or proprietary nature of the foundation technologies on which these cloud platforms are built. In this paper we present a novel solution which aims to cover a gap in a subsection of this problem domain. Our solution offer a security architecture that enables service owners to provision a dynamic and service-oriented secure virtual private network on top of multiple cloud IaaS providers. It does this by leveraging the scalability, robustness and flexibility of peer- to-peer overlay techniques to eliminate the manual configuration, key management and peer churn problems encountered in setting up the secure communication channels dynamically, between different components of a typical service that is deployed on multiple clouds. We present the implementation details of our solution as well as experimental results carried out on two commercial clouds