A Device Abstraction Framework for the Robotic Mediator Collaborating with Smart Environments

A robotic mediator is a robot platform that mediates between the user and the smart environment system in order to capture user´s intent and provide proactive services by collaborating with available resources in the environment. In order for a robotic mediator to provide the user with proactive context-aware services, it must communicate and collaborate with diverse heterogeneous devices and systems in the smart environment. However, existing network robot software platforms are not flexible enough to effectively integrate both of the respective features specific to robots and environments. Moreover, they do not support high-level collaboration model that is crucial to enable mediating between the user and the smart environment. In order to address the problem, we proposed ICARS [10], 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. In this paper, we present the detailed design, implementation, and experiments of ICARS mainly focusing on the communication/device model layer. 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 easy development of high-level collaborative applications.