Integrating Smart Mobile Devices for Immersive Interaction and Control of Physical Systems: A Cyber-Physical Approach

Abstract

The embedded technologies integrated into smart mobile devices are becoming increasingly more powerful and being applied to solve disparate societal problems in unprecedented new ways. Billions of smartphones and tablet computers have already reshaped the daily lives of users, and efforts are currently underway to introduce mobile devices to some of the most remote and impoverished areas of the world. With an ever-expanding list of sensors and features, smartphones and tablet computers are now more capable than ever of enhancing not only our interactions with software and with each other, but with the physical world as well. To utilize smart mobile devices at the center of rich human-in-the-loop cyber-physical systems, their sensing, storage, computation, and communication (SSCC) capabilities must be examined from a mechatronics perspective rather than the contexts in which they are conventionally treated (e.g., messaging, surfing the web, playing games, navigation, and social networking). In this chapter, we discuss how state of the art mobile technologies may be integrated into human-in-the-loop cyber-physical systems and exploited to provide natural mappings for remote interactions with such systems. A demonstrative example is used to show how an intuitive metaphor is uncovered for performing a balancing task through the teleoperation of a ball and beam test-bed.