As Internet of Things (IoT)-based sensors have emerged recently, new technologies are being developed for users to provide suitable services by recognizing the surrounding situations. In the service robot sector, many researches are being carried out in order to exploit the collected data from IoT-based sensors. In addition, researches on robot middleware using context information are actively performed.In this paper, we propose a robot SW platform, which provides IoT-based context-aware services. This robot software platform consists of Ontology Agent, Robot Service Execution Engine, and Context Handler. The Ontology Agent is a module that searches information, such as sensor location, value type, etc., of the IoT devices stored in Ontology Repository and provides them to the Context Handler. The Context Handler reads IoT devices' data and checks whether service transition conditions are met. If the conditions are satis¯ed, the data is delivered to the Robot Service Execution Engine, which is in charge of executing services. In experiments, we show a procedure executing the context-aware robot services through de¯nition of robot services, a robot service execution engine, and a context handler, etc.
These days, using robots has gradually been extending from the limited industrial areas in factories to service areas for the general public in everyday life. It is possible to imagine that end users easily control robots and they define new services by themselves as they wish in the near future. However, there are three issues to resolve to realize the future. Firstly, it is required to abstract robots' behaviors from primitive robot functions, and secondly, we need context awareness in order to provide users with the appropriate services. Lastly end users can define the robot services easily. In this paper, we propose three layered middleware architecture for automated robot services to resolve the problems. The lowest layer abstracts robots' behaviors in functional level, and the middle layer provides users with robot services based on the situational information. And the highest layer defines robot services by sequential order. End users can define practically a flow of robot services by using an intuitive GUI. We showed the availability and effectiveness of the layered middleware architecture with a prototype system, which presents the facile definition of robot services in application level, the control process of robot service, and the abstraction process of robot services.
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