Accessors and the RoboCafé: Interoperability in the Internet of Things
Pat Pannuto

Citation
Pat Pannuto. "Accessors and the RoboCafé: Interoperability in the Internet of Things". Talk or presentation, 10, May, 2016; Poster, INC12, LEUVEN BELGIUM.

Abstract
At DARPA's WaitWhat? conference in 2015, the TerraSwarm Research Center debuted the RoboCafé, an interconnected swarm of robots, sensors, and people. A key challenge for the emerging Internet of Things is interoperability. Interoperation is not simply support for three vendors' smart light bulb APIs. It requires policies for sharing contested resources and decoupling intent from devices - raising the blinds may light a room as easily as turning on a light. Accessors are an active research project exploring these questions, and the RoboCafé an application that stressed, tested, broke, and informed Accessor design. In the RoboCafé, a swarm of mobile robots patrol the café, moving in a sentry pattern to periodically visit the whole space. As the robots move around an online summarization algorithm continuously extracts "interesting" things the robot encounters, clips of each new face the robot sees. Users in the RoboCafé can use a smartphone app to order candy or snacks. Upon ordering, the smartphone is automatically localized and a robot is taken off patrol and tasked to deliver the goods to the user. At any point, the detection of applause in the environment will demand robot attention no matter its previous task, simulating critical events such as gunshot detection. The key technical challenge of the RoboCafé lies in the integration of very disparate technologies: online summarization of key events, an acoustic-based positioning service for localizing people in the café environment, a machine-learning framework for context detection, and the control of a swarm of mobile robots. Accessors recast each of these technologies as event-driven actors with tightly constrained interfaces. The Accessor architecture decouples the control and data plane, starting acoustic event detection and handling reported applause events, but leaving the transport of high-bandwidth audio signals to the underlying system. A policy engine federates access to robots, allowing applause events to supersede food delivery or patrols. The unified model of computation facilitates reasoning of interactions between applications and opens the door to applying formal methods for proving overall system correctness.

Electronic downloads

Internal. This publication has been marked by the author for TerraSwarm-only distribution, so electronic downloads are not available without logging in.

Citation formats

• HTML

  Pat Pannuto. <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/795.html"
  ><i>Accessors and the RoboCafé:
  Interoperability in the Internet of
  Things</i></a>, Talk or presentation,  10, May,
  2016; Poster, INC12, LEUVEN BELGIUM.

• Plain text

  Pat Pannuto. "Accessors and the RoboCafé:
  Interoperability in the Internet of Things". Talk or
  presentation,  10, May, 2016; Poster, INC12, LEUVEN BELGIUM.

• BibTeX

  @presentation{Pannuto16_AccessorsRoboCafInteroperabilityInInternetOfThings,
      author = {Pat Pannuto},
      title = {Accessors and the RoboCafé: Interoperability in
                the Internet of Things},
      day = {10},
      month = {May},
      year = {2016},
      note = {Poster, INC12, LEUVEN BELGIUM},
      abstract = {At DARPA's WaitWhat? conference in 2015, the
                TerraSwarm Research Center debuted the RoboCafé,
                an interconnected swarm of robots, sensors, and
                people. A key challenge for the emerging Internet
                of Things is interoperability. Interoperation is
                not simply support for three vendors' smart light
                bulb APIs. It requires policies for sharing
                contested resources and decoupling intent from
                devices - raising the blinds may light a room as
                easily as turning on a light. Accessors are an
                active research project exploring these questions,
                and the RoboCafé an application that stressed,
                tested, broke, and informed Accessor design. In
                the RoboCafé, a swarm of mobile robots patrol the
                café, moving in a sentry pattern to periodically
                visit the whole space. As the robots move around
                an online summarization algorithm continuously
                extracts "interesting" things the robot
                encounters, clips of each new face the robot sees.
                Users in the RoboCafé can use a smartphone app to
                order candy or snacks. Upon ordering, the
                smartphone is automatically localized and a robot
                is taken off patrol and tasked to deliver the
                goods to the user. At any point, the detection of
                applause in the environment will demand robot
                attention no matter its previous task, simulating
                critical events such as gunshot detection. The key
                technical challenge of the RoboCafé lies in the
                integration of very disparate technologies: online
                summarization of key events, an acoustic-based
                positioning service for localizing people in the
                café environment, a machine-learning framework
                for context detection, and the control of a swarm
                of mobile robots. Accessors recast each of these
                technologies as event-driven actors with tightly
                constrained interfaces. The Accessor architecture
                decouples the control and data plane, starting
                acoustic event detection and handling reported
                applause events, but leaving the transport of
                high-bandwidth audio signals to the underlying
                system. A policy engine federates access to
                robots, allowing applause events to supersede food
                delivery or patrols. The unified model of
                computation facilitates reasoning of interactions
                between applications and opens the door to
                applying formal methods for proving overall system
                correctness.},
      URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/795.html}
  }
  

Posted by Elizabeth Coyne on 16 May 2016.
Groups: services