Ubiquitous robot simulation framework and its applications

Abstract

We describe in this paper a framework, called URSF, for simulating ubiquitous computing environment and ubiquitous robots. URSF provides in/out channel with which ubiquitous robot platforms can be plugged. Once connected to the framework, ubiquitous robot platform can percept and affect the world simulated in the framework. The simulated world is built by composing a simulation space and placing in it operational components such as appliances, sensors, persons, robots etc. Each operational component continuously generates context data, which are fed to the plugged platform. The platform builds world model by interpreting the context data stream. Operational components in the simulation space expose services through semantic Web service scheme, through which plugged platform can affect the simulated world. Semantic Web service scheme enables automated discovery of services dynamically coming and going in the simulation space. The framework can be used to observe how robots interact with environment via ubiquitous network. We discuss two advanced usages of URSF: intelligent robot manipulation and mixed robot-reality manifestation.