Collaborative Computing On-demand: Harnessing Mobile Devices in Executing On-the-Fly Jobs

Abstract

Systems employing mobile devices (e.g., sensors, smart phones, robots) are emerging with growing capabilities in performing a wide variety of tasks. Due to their abundance and wide deployments, they are posed to play a dominant role in providing a rich mobile computing platform for various jobs, especially for new ones that are created on-the-fly. Realizing this platform is challenging since it is hard to predict the exact equipment present in an environment, what types of information need to be communicated to the devices to execute their tasks, and how to reprogram these devices. This work proposes a new on-demand collaborative computing framework that maps a new job as a set of tasks onto the mobile devices for execution. The mapping is done in a manner that takes into account the capabilities of the devices, the dependency between the tasks, the adjacency of the devices, and the requirements of the requested new job. Our proposed framework is implemented as a test-bed in our Mobile Cyber-Physical Systems lab with MICAz sensors and iRobot Create robots.