Hardware Layer of Ambient Intelligence Environment Implementation

Abstract

Ambient Intelligence is growing phenomena caused by advances of speed and size of computational hardware. It is possible to collect data from various sensors, devices or services and react to evaluated event and start the predefined process. These systems are closely connected with Cloud based services as they provide publicly available interface for management and visualization, computational and storage capabilities for forecasts and other advanced data processing to create ambient intelligence environment. The true ambient environments react to the presence of people and the sensors and actuators have become part of the environment. This article presents RoboPhery project aimed to provide abstraction layer for interfacing any low cost hardware sensors and actuators with MQTT and Time-series Database bindings, that can serve as sensory network for Ambient Intelligence environments. The service architecture is designed to be so simple at hardware level to support single-board micro-controllers like ESP2866, ESP32 modules as well as single-board computers based on ARM or x86 architectures. The communication among individual devices is handled by the standard MQTT messages. The same devices can be configured to support multiple use-cases on configuration level to lower the operational costs of the solution.