Light-Weight Decentralized Autonomic Web Service Discovery for Systems with Heterogeneous Communication Capabilities

Abstract

Interoperability between autonomous systems like robot swarm or mobile software agents rely on efficient and seamless communication. Such mobile and dynamic environments pertain self-organization and self configuration of computing entities, a need for autonomic publishing and discovery of resources, and communication from and to outside world. Furthermore, such systems are attributed by heterogeneous communication capabilities of various computing entities. We take Web services approach for robot swarm based on robotic communication capabilities and propose a collaborative and decentralized services discovery and management middleware. Our approach provides a loose coupling in terms of space and time and uses both Internet based communication and RFID tags as message post boxes/relays for communication between robots when communication over the Internet is not available.