The Context-Awareness for the Network-based Intelligent Robot Services

Abstract

Recently, while the existing industrial robot market is saturated, the research about the service robot is actively progressed. In order that the service robot comes into our daily lives like the electric home appliances or mobile devices, it has to provide the intelligent services to a user. Generally, the robot has three functional components of sensing, processing and acting. The ability of these components depends on its own hardware performance. Ubiquitous Robotic Companion (hereafter URC) is the new concept of the network-based service robot (Kim et al., 2005). In the concept of URC, a robot expands the ability of these components through the network. The robot can use not only its internal sensors but also external sensors which are embedded in the environment for sensing. A number of robots can share a high performance server to increase the processing power. Also, it can use the external actuators which are deployed in the environment, not only in its body, for acting. These improvements can bring about the enhancement of context awareness and provide proactive services to the users. When a user requests a service, a robot is able to provide appropriate services by recognizing the user’s current situations. Thus, to realize the URC, it is important to develop a context-aware system which can help robots become aware of user’s situations. The context-aware system is comprised of the various kinds of distributed computing entities. Early context-aware systems had the relatively simple structure because of being only comprised of distributed elements which communicate with the local or the remote sensors. But, as the structure of the context-aware system become complicated and various applications appear, the context-aware infrastructure has been needed in order to enhance the maintenance and the reuse of the context-aware application. It can help to remove the complexity of the application development. Therefore, the development of the contextaware framework which can provide reusable components with high-level abstraction is needed. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the context-awareness for a network-based service robot. For this, we define the functional requirements and implementation issues of the context-aware framework and propose the layered conceptual structure. And then, we describe how proposed conceptual structure was implemented to the CAMUS (ContextAware Middleware for URC System) which is a context-aware framework for the networkbased service robots. Finally, we introduce various kinds of robot services which were developed by using the CAMUS.