ICARS : Integrated Control Architecture for the Robotic Mediator in Smart Environments: A Software Framework for the Robotic Mediator Collaborating with Smart Environments

Collaboration of robots and smart environments is an essential issue when we want to enable a robotic mediator to provide the users with proactive context-aware services in smart environments. However, existing network robot software platforms are not flexible enough to effectively integrate both the respective features specific to robots and to environments. In addition, they do not support high-level collaboration model that is crucial to enable mediating between the user and the smart environment. This paper proposes ICARS, an integrated control architecture for the robotic mediator in smart environments. ICARS consists of three layers each of which provides a flexible communication/device model, an adaptive service model for the integrated robot control architecture and a behavior-based high-level collaboration model as a key feature respectively. We present the detailed design, implementation, and experiments of ICARS. The experimental results show that ICARS enables flexible integration of the diverse devices in the robot and environment, adaptive service provision for collaborative services and easier development of high-level collaborative applications.