Towards Ubiquitous Robotic Companion: Design and Implementation of Ubiquitous Robotic Service Framework

Abstract

In recent years, motivated by the emergence of ubiquitous computing technologies, a new class of networked robots, ubiquitous robots, has been introduced. The Ubiquitous Robotic Companion (URC) is our conceptual vision of ubiquitous service robots that provide users with the services they need, anytime and anywhere in ubiquitous computing environments. To realize the vision of URC, one of the essential requirements for robotic systems is to support ubiquity of services: that is, a robot service must be always available even though there are changes in the service environments. Specifically robotic systems need to be automatically interoperable with sensors and devices in current service environments, rather than statically preprogrammed for them. In this paper, the design and implementation of a semantic‐based ubiquitous robotic space (SemanticURS) is presented. SemanticURS enables automated integration of networked robots into ubiquitous computing environments exploiting Semantic Web Services and AI‐based planning technologies.

Where Robots and Virtual Agents Meet

“…The Ubiquitous Robotic Companion (URC) [26], for example, guards its owner's home, cleans their rooms and reads to their kids. The URC also provided one of the first mass deployment examples of ubiquitous robots with roughly one thousand URCs distributed to households in Seoul and the vicinity.…”

“…For instance, wearable RFID tags have been proposed in conjunction with ubiquitous robotic systems [26] to aid the detection and the location of users in the environment, as the RFID tags are sensed by the ubiquitous infrastructure and the relevant information stored in it (user identity and location) is communicated to the robots. Notably, such an approach can substitute conventional (and more difficult to realise) robot-centric perception as even simple robots (e.g.…”

Integration framework for interoperability of distributed and heterogeneous robot middlewares

“…With the proliferation of the communication network technologies, the number of researches and development projects aiming at making robots and robot systems more intelligent by distributing their necessary resources and functionalities over the network are increasing [1], [2], [3], [4]. Recent advances in ubiquitous computing technologies are promoting initiation of various research projects in order to support development of network based robotic systems more easily in a cost effective way.…”

A snake-based scheme for path planning and control with constraints by distributed visual sensors

“…7,8 One example is the Ubiquitous Robotic Companion (URC), which was developed to enable automated integration of networked robots into ubiquitous computing environments. 9 Robotic ecology was introduced in the PEIS project 10 to enable robots to interact with distributed sensors and actuators in an intelligent environment. This approach simplified complex tasks of on-board functionalities by interactions with inter-connected PEIS components in the environment.…”

“…11 In these systems, pervasive intelligence provided semantically interpretable information to a robot for decision making at the symbolic level 9,12 but left low-level skills such as navigation to the robot. There is a trade-off between distributed intelligence and robot on-board intelligence.…”