A middleware for intelligent environments and the internet of things

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research from the domains of pervasive computing or ubiquitous computing, computer-human-interaction and computer science has led to the development of many intelligent environments, either on lab scale or as live in laboratories. While several middleware have been developed in this field, no standard middleware for intelligent environments or ubiquitous computing has evolved yet. We consider the lack of a de-facto standard middleware for distributed sensor-actuator environments as one of the key issues limiting research on intelligent environment and the proliferation of intelligent environments from research environments to their deployment in our everyday lives. In addition, we expect the advent of personal robotics for health care and ambient assisted living scenarios in the context of ubiquitous computing in the close future. In this paper, we report on the successful application of a robotic middleware as glue between sensors, actuators and services and its application in a deployed example scenario. Thereby, we verify by examples the applicability of robotic middleware for complex ubiquitous computing environments. To foster re-use and potential community-adoption, we share our source code, documentation and data sets (in the future) via https://vmi.lmt.ei.tum.de/ros/ . © 2010 Springer-Verlag.