Autonomous and universal remote control scheme

With the development of information technology, the traditional information appliance (IA) will further evolve. IA in the future will enter every home with competitive pricing, friendly control interface, and the integration of wired and wireless network. Accompanied with the increasing variety and functions of IAs, more and more controllers are created and this makes the controller an inseparable part to IA. But more and more controllers subjected to different IAs make the operation difficult since you have to switch from one controller to another when you want to operate different IAs. Although there are some configurable controllers, a controller with many physical buttons on top, on the market, they must be configured with the channels of the subjected IAs first before use. In this work, the autonomous and generic remote control scheme is proposed to serve as the remote control scheme between controllers and IAs. The generic remote controller (GRC) can automatically detect the controlled subjects and dynamically download the context for the controlled subjects. Users can conveniently control different IAs without prior configurations to the GRC. The IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN devices and infrared rays are utilized with Java RMI technology to develop the prototype of GRC with the characteristics of autonomous universal controlling. LEGO RCX robots and Java Media Framework (JMF) packages are used to create some simple controlled subjects to verify the viability of this architecture. Consequently, the infrastructure, related definitions, and viability of this scheme are verified. We believe in the near future that this scheme can evolve into a practical development platform applied in various devices, such as IAs, production machines, medical equipment, etc.