An Inexpensive, Off-The-Shelf Platform for Networked Embedded Robotics

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of a new class of devices, commonly referred to as Networked Embedded Devices. Their increasingly low cost and small size make them suited for large scale sensing applications. Likewise, they could be appealing as a means to embed intelligent actuation capabilities into the environment, turning simple artifacts into networked robotic appliances. The currently existing devices, however, are not suited for this development. In this paper, we present the PEIS-Mote: an open, general, small-size and inexpensive sensor-actuator node especially suited for networked robotics, and built from commonly available off-the-shelf components. This platform can run a popular operating system for sensor networks, TinyOS, which makes it interoperable with most commercially available sensor nodes.