RoboMaidHome: A Sensor Network-based Smart Home Environment for Service Robots

Abstract

Over the past few years, many research groups have attempted to build smart environments. Recently, several groups have been actively conducting research into the construction of smart home environment for service robots to be used as assistants. A home service robot must have are localization, navigation, object recognition, and object handling functionalities. These operations are usually performed by a service robot by itself and the robot can perform the given tasks in a limited environment. In addition, they have shown only limited capabilities in a natural environment. We initiated a smart home environment project, RoboMaidHome, for light-weight service robots to provide reliable services by interacting with the environment through wireless sensor networks. This environment consists of the following three main components: (i) smart objects and smart appliances with sensor network functionality; (ii) a home server that connects smart devices as well as maintains information for reliable services; and (iii) service robots that perform tasks in collaboration with the environment. In this paper, we explain the basic concepts and the architecture of our project and address some key issues related to the project. Finally, we discuss the future directions of our project.

Integration of Service Robots in the Smart Home

“…A more general approach is provided by DH-Compliant [188,173], which is an architecture tailored for the integration of home automation systems and service robots. Other alternatives are: Miro [189], which is an object-oriented robot middleware that makes the development of mobile robot applications easier and faster, and promotes the portability and maintainability of robot software; ROS (Robot Operating System) [107], which is an open source framework to support modular, tools-based software development; OROCOS (Open Robot Control Software) [108,190,191], which is an open distributed framework for robot control, consisting of object libraries and components, and a standard middleware; and RoboMaidHome [192], which consists of a wireless sensor networks for service robots to provide reliable services.…”

Centroid based 3D localization technique using RSSI with a mobile robot

“…In CL algorithm, beacon nodes initially knows their location information, then broadcasts their position details to all the remaining nodes which are in network range. After the target node gets all beacon nodes information, it calculates position T e (x, y) from n beacon nodes as shown in equation (1). The localization error E(x,y) is defined as distance between estimated target position (T e (x, y)) to actual target position (T (x, y)) as shown in equation (2).…”

“…Development in wireless communications and electronics has enhanced micro sensors technology, smartness in controlling and monitoring sensors in a sensor network [1]. Wireless sensor networks are used for sensing physical factors like temperature, humidity and also for monitoring and detecting environmental factors, chemicals, smoke etc.…”

Off the Shelf Cloud Robotics for the Smart Home: Empowering a Wireless Robot through Cloud Computing

“…A more general approach is provided by DH-Compliant [8,9], which is an architecture tailored for the integration of home automation systems and service robots. Other alternatives are: Miro [10], which is an object-oriented robot middleware that makes the development of mobile robot applications easier and faster, and promotes the portability and maintainability of robot software; ROS (Robot Operating System) [11], which is an open source framework to support modular, tools-based software development; OROCOS (Open Robot Control Software) [12,13,14], which is an open distributed framework for robot control, consisting of object libraries and components, and a standard middleware; and RoboMaidHome [15], which consists of wireless sensor networks for service robots to provide reliable services.…”