Kang-Woo Lee

A middleware for supporting context-aware services in mobile and ubiquitous environment

Ubiquitous computing has developed with mobile computing technology. With the recent advances in mobile computer technology and wireless network, the nature of the services proposed to the users is moving towards mobile and context-aware services. On account of such moving, applications and services in mobile and ubiquitous environment must be aware of their changing environments and adapt according to changing contexts. However, developing such systems providing context-aware applications or services is still a complex and time-consuming task. Therefore, we introduce architecture of context-aware service middleware (CASM) that will provide a middleware-level support for building and rapid prototyping of context-aware services and describe interactions based on the architecture.

ICARS : Integrated Control Architecture for the Robotic Mediator in Smart Environments: A Software Framework for the Robotic Mediator Collaborating with Smart Environments

Collaboration of robots and smart environments is an essential issue when we want to enable a robotic mediator to provide the users with proactive context-aware services in smart environments. However, existing network robot software platforms are not flexible enough to effectively integrate both the respective features specific to robots and to environments. In addition, they do not support high-level collaboration model that is crucial to enable mediating between the user and the smart environment. This paper proposes ICARS, an integrated control architecture for the robotic mediator in smart environments. ICARS consists of three layers each of which provides a flexible communication/device model, an adaptive service model for the integrated robot control architecture and a behavior-based high-level collaboration model as a key feature respectively. We present the detailed design, implementation, and experiments of ICARS. The experimental results show that ICARS enables flexible integration of the diverse devices in the robot and environment, adaptive service provision for collaborative services and easier development of high-level collaborative applications.

An ECA rule-based task programming language for ubiquitous environments

Development of ubiquitous applications makes big difference from usual programming in that the application involves the context data management, event-handling process, and communications over distributed modules. This article introduces `PLUE (a programming language for ubiquitous environment) a Java based language which aims at support of rapid ubiquitous application development. UDM (universal data model), the underlying context data model of PLUE, manages the heterogeneous data seamlessly. PLUE is now working on top of CAMUS (context-aware middleware for ubiquitous robot system), although it depends little on the underlying systems

Continuous location tracking of people by multiple depth cameras

This paper describes the design and implementation of a novel multi-depth camera multi-person tracking system. We propose a zone-space model for effectively cooperating with multiple depth cameras. Based on the system model, we devise a tracking-session association algorithm to find out a correct mapping between new observations and users scattered in the zones consisting of a space. Our system model supports flexible and extensible dynamic management of zones consisting of a space. Experiment results show that the proposed tracking-session algorithm shows good tracking performance such as location errors and hand over between zones.

Scenario-Based programming for ubiquitous applications

Ubiquitous applications usually involve highly interactive context data management. Traditional general-purpose programming languages are not sufficient for use in this domain, as they do not have the capability to manage such data effectively. We have developed a scenario-based programming language that we call ‘PLUE (Programming Language for Ubiquitous Environment), which is a Java-based prototyping language for ubiquitous application development. PLUE supports ECA (event-condition-action) rules and finite state automata-based (FSA-based) interactive responses to dynamic situations. In addition, PLUE programmers are able to manage heterogeneous data with a uniform view of path expressions. We have implemented PLUE on top of CAMUS (Context-Aware Middleware for Ubiquitous Robotic Companion System), a framework for context-aware applications that was originally developed for network-based robots.

The Context-Awareness for the Network-based Intelligent Robot Services

Recently, while the existing industrial robot market is saturated, the research about the service robot is actively progressed. In order that the service robot comes into our daily lives like the electric home appliances or mobile devices, it has to provide the intelligent services to a user. Generally, the robot has three functional components of sensing, processing and acting. The ability of these components depends on its own hardware performance. Ubiquitous Robotic Companion (hereafter URC) is the new concept of the network-based service robot (Kim et al., 2005). In the concept of URC, a robot expands the ability of these components through the network. The robot can use not only its internal sensors but also external sensors which are embedded in the environment for sensing. A number of robots can share a high performance server to increase the processing power. Also, it can use the external actuators which are deployed in the environment, not only in its body, for acting. These improvements can bring about the enhancement of context awareness and provide proactive services to the users. When a user requests a service, a robot is able to provide appropriate services by recognizing the user’s current situations. Thus, to realize the URC, it is important to develop a context-aware system which can help robots become aware of user’s situations. The context-aware system is comprised of the various kinds of distributed computing entities. Early context-aware systems had the relatively simple structure because of being only comprised of distributed elements which communicate with the local or the remote sensors. But, as the structure of the context-aware system become complicated and various applications appear, the context-aware infrastructure has been needed in order to enhance the maintenance and the reuse of the context-aware application. It can help to remove the complexity of the application development. Therefore, the development of the contextaware framework which can provide reusable components with high-level abstraction is needed. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the context-awareness for a network-based service robot. For this, we define the functional requirements and implementation issues of the context-aware framework and propose the layered conceptual structure. And then, we describe how proposed conceptual structure was implemented to the CAMUS (ContextAware Middleware for URC System) which is a context-aware framework for the networkbased service robots. Finally, we introduce various kinds of robot services which were developed by using the CAMUS.

A software framework for robotic mediators in smart environments

The experience of full automation without explicit user direction may induce anxiety among smart space users. The use of explicit mediators between users and fully automated systems may help to mitigate users’ anxiety. While robots mediators are one possible solution, several issues remain, including high complexity and limited collaboration between robots and smart space platforms, reducing overall system reliability. This paper proposes the Integrated Control Architecture for Robotic mediator in Smart environments (ICARS) as a solution to improve the integration and reliability of robot mediators within automated smart spaces. Assuming relatively thin network robots as robotic mediators to enable a wide distribution with less cost, ICARS provides a well-organized software framework consisting of three layers to integrate robots and smart spaces: a flexible communication/device model, an adaptive service model for the integrated robot control architecture, and a behavior-based high-level collaboration model. In this paper, we also present details of the design, implementation, and an application scenario conducted with ICARS. The results show that ICARS enables flexible integration of the diverse devices associated with robots and environments, adaptive service provision for collaborative services, and easier development of high-level collaborative applications with decent performance.

A Device Abstraction Framework for the Robotic Mediator Collaborating with Smart Environments

A robotic mediator is a robot platform that mediates between the user and the smart environment system in order to capture users intent and provide proactive services by collaborating with available resources in the environment. In order for a robotic mediator to provide the user with proactive context-aware services, it must communicate and collaborate with diverse heterogeneous devices and systems in the smart environment. However, existing network robot software platforms are not flexible enough to effectively integrate both of the respective features specific to robots and environments. Moreover, they do not support high-level collaboration model that is crucial to enable mediating between the user and the smart environment. In order to address the problem, we proposed ICARS [10], integrated control architecture for the robotic mediator in smart environments. ICARS consists of three layers each of which provides a flexible communication/device model, an adaptive service model for the integrated robot control architecture and a behavior-based high-level collaboration model as a key feature respectively. In this paper, we present the detailed design, implementation, and experiments of ICARS mainly focusing on the communication/device model layer. The experimental results show that ICARS enables flexible integration of the diverse devices in the robot and environment, adaptive service provision for collaborative services and easy development of high-level collaborative applications.

Virtual enterprises using the collaboration agency infrastructure

This paper describes an open and flexible infrastructure to support dynamic collaboration among companies through the entire lifecycle of the virtual enterprise. The proposed approach is an agent-enhanced architecture on which the conversation model is grafted. The collaboration among enterprises is modeled by a collaboration policy which is a machine-readable specification of a pattern of message exchange among agents participating in the collaboration. The proposed system is widely open and highly flexible since various types of software, including Web services, can collaborate through the conversation model.

Abstraction for privacy in context-aware environments

Privacy protection operation may block customized services in context aware systems. Adopting good privacy policies will be helpful to avoid such unfortunate situations, but traditional access control policies are not enough for this purpose. This paper proposes a privacy policy description mechanism for context-aware systems. It provides the facilities to describe abstraction on context data, in order to prevent invading users privacy, while keeping the context-aware serves continuing.