A hardware/software embedded agent for real-time control of ambient-intelligence environments

This paper presents the development of an embedded intelligent agent able to perform real-time control of ambient-intelligence environments. The system has been implemented as a system-on-programmable chip (SoPC) on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). The scheme used for realizing the intelligent agent is an adaptive neuro-fuzzy system (NFS) enhanced with a principal component analysis (PCA) pre-processor. The PCA pre-processing stage allows a reduction of the input dimensions (features) with no meaningful loss of modeling capability. As a consequence, the computational complexity of the system is significantly reduced, allowing its implementation on a single electronic device. The NFS-PCA agent has been tested with data obtained in a real ubiquitous computing environment test bed. Results obtained show that the agent is able to perform real-time control of the environment in a proactive and non-intrusive way, and also to adapt to changes of user's preferences in a life-long mode.