Ubiquitous Robot: A New Paradigm for Integrated Services

This paper presents the components and overall architecture of the ubiquitous robot (Ubibot) system developed to demonstrate ubiquitous robotics, a new paradigm for integrated services. The system has been developed on the basis of the definition of the ubiquitous robot as that of encompassing the software robot Sobot, embedded robot Embot and the mobile robot Mobot. This tripartite partition, which independently manifests intelligence, perception and action, enables the abstraction of intelligence through the standardization of sensory data and motor or action commands. The Ubibot system itself is introduced along with its component subsystems of Embots, the position Embot, vision Embot and sound Embot, the Mobots of Mybot and HSR, the Sobot, Rity, a virtual pet modeled as an artificial creature, and finally the middleware which seamlessly enables interconnection between other components. Three kinds of experiments are devised to demonstrate the fundamental features, of calm sensing, context awareness and seamless service transcending the spatial limitations in the abilities of earlier generation personal robots. The experiments demonstrate the proof of concept of this powerful new paradigm which shows great promise.