Digital representation of everyday objects in a robot ecology via proxies

Abstract

Abstract-Robotic middlewares increasingly allow the seamless integration of multiple heterogeneous robots into one distributed system. Unfortunately, very simple devices like tagged everyday objects and smart objects are left orphan in this otherwise pervasive trend. We claim that the inclusion of simple everyday objects as part of distributed robot systems would have many advantages, and propose a design pattern to allow this inclusion. We make this pattern concrete by describing an implementation of it using a specific multi-robot middleware, called PEIS-Ecology Middleware. We also show an illustrative experiment which integrates everyday objects in a smart home equipped with mobile robots as well as more advanced distributed sensor nodes.

The PEIS-Ecology project: Vision and results

“…Moreover, the PEIS-middleware allows the inclusion into the PEIS-Ecology of very simple devices and everyday objects (e.g., an RFID-tagged coffee cup) using a "proxy" mechanism [10]. The full PEIS-Ecology middleware, including the PEISkernel, has been released as open-source under a set of GNU licenses, and it is available from the project website [5].…”