Abstract-The vision of an Ecology of Physically EmbeddedIntelligent Systems, or PEIS-Ecology, combines insights from the fields of autonomous robotics and ambient intelligence to provide a new approach to building robotic systems in the service of people. In this paper, we present this vision, and we report the results of a four-year collaborative research project between Sweden and Korea aimed at the concrete realization of this vision. We focus in particular on three results: a robotic middleware able to cope with highly heterogeneous systems; a technique for autonomous self-configuration and reconfiguration; and a study of the problem of sharing information of both physical and digital nature.

We consider distributed systems of networked robots in which: (1) each robot includes sensing, acting and/or processing modular functionalities; and (2) robots can help each other by offering those functionalities. A functional configuration is any way to allocate and connect functionalities among the robots. An interesting feature of a system of this type is the possibility to use different functional configurations to make the same set of robots perform different tasks, or to perform the same task under different conditions. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically generate, at run time, a functional configuration of a network robot system to perform a given task in a given environment, and to dynamically change this configuration in response to failures. Our approach is based on artificial intelligence planning techniques, and it is provably sound, complete and optimal. Moreover, our configuration planner can be combined with an action planner to deal with tasks that require sequences of configurations. We illustrate our approach on a specific type of network robot system, called Peis-Ecology, and show experiments in which a sequence of configurations is automatically generated and executed on real robots. These experiments demonstrate that our self-configuration approach can help the system to achieve greater autonomy, flexibility and robustness.

Abstract-We consider an ecology of robots in which robots can help each other by offering information-producing functionalities. A functional configuration of this ecology is a way to allocate and connect functionalities among the participating robots. In general, different configurations can be used to solve the same task, depending on the current situation, and some tasks require sequences of different configurations to be solved. In this paper, we propose a plan-based approach to automatically generate a preferred configuration for a given task, environment, and set of resources. We also describe how our configuration planner can be integrated with an action planner to deal with tasks that require sequences of configurations. We illustrate these ideas on a specific instance of an ecology of robots, called a PEIS Ecology. We also show an experiment run on our PEIS Ecology testbed, in which a sequence of configurations for an olfactory task is automatically generated and executed.

There is a tendency today toward the study of distributed systems consisting of many heterogeneous, networked, cooperating robotic devices. We refer to a system of this type as an ecology of robots. We call functional configuration of this ecology a way to allocate and connect functionalities among its robots. In general, the same ecology can perform different tasks by using different configuration. Moreover, the same task can often be solved using different configurations, and which is the best one depends on the available resources. This potential flexibility of a robot ecology is reduced by the fact that, in most current approaches, configurations are pre-programmed by hand. In this paper, we propose a plan-based approach to automatically generate a preferred configuration of a robot ecology given a task, environment, and set of resources. In contrast to previous approaches, the state of the ecology is automatically acquired at planning time, and it is monitored during execution in order to reconfigure if a functionality fails. We illustrate these ideas on a specific instance of an ecology of robots, called PEIS Ecology. We also show an experiment run on our PEIS Ecology testbed, in which a robot needs to reconfigure when the original configuration fails.