Plug-and-play: bridging the semantic gap between application and transducers

Plug-and-play is an important mechanism for achieving component integration and improving interoperability in smart transducer systems. While recent research in smart transducer interfaces has achieved a syntactically well-defined interface to arbitrary sensors and actuators, current plug-and-play approaches are limited by the semantic gap between the control application and the generic smart transducers. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem by establishing a smart interface system that consumes the sensor data from the smart transducers and provides a syntactically and semantically standardized interface to the control application. The smart interface system would be configured using data from the transducer meta-description, a system meta-description and the requirements from generic sensor data processing. As case study for such an interface system we present a generic high-level application component inform of the generic certainty grid, a sensor fusion algorithm for obstacle detection, and an approach for automatically configuring this application component and its associated smart transducer nodes in a plug-and-play like manner