Collaborative and distributed intelligent environment merging virtual and physical realities

This paper introduces the development of a new collaborative and distributed intelligent environment that supports collaboration among geographically dispersed people including intelligent systems. The collaborative and distributed intelligent environment merges seamlessly mixed realities in terms of physical space, document, people, physical facilities and equipment, virtual environments, collaborative control, distributed teleopreration, decision making, etc. into one shared collaborative space. This approach aims to bridge the gap between reality and virtuality beyond time and physical constraints. Such capabilities have been achieved through the design and implementation of innovative, interactive, shared, 3D multi-user collaborative and distributed intelligent environment (CoDIE). CoDIE represents an integrated approach with embedded systems that offers the capability to administer distributed environment and resources with people accessing the environment remotely and others are collocated with the physical counterpart supported by ambient intelligence techniques. The developed environment can be used as a metaphor for wide range of application domains to integrate distributed resources, supports synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, distributed teleoperation, collaborative control, and to enable people to work beyond time and physical constraints. The talk presents the concept of CoDIE and describes its four-tire architecture and the key features and functionalities associated with its development and implementation. Finally, the paper highlights briefly the development of an educational and training robot center integrated with distributed physical and virtual facilities through the use of CoDIE.