Pervasive pheromone-based interaction with RFID tags

Abstract

Despite the growing interest in pheromone-based interaction to enforce adaptive and context-aware coordination, the number of deployed systems exploiting digital pheromones to coordinate the activities of situated autonomous agents is still very limited. In this article, we present a simple low-cost and general-purpose implementation of a pheromone-based interaction mechanism for pervasive environments. This is realized by making use of RFID tags to store digital pheromones and by having humans or robots spread/sense pheromones by properly writing/reading RFID tags populating the surrounding physical environment. We exemplify and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach via an application for object-tracking. This application allows robots and humans to find forgotten-somewhere objects by following pheromones trails associated with them. In addition, we sketch further potential applications of our approach in pervasive computing scenarios, discuss related work in the area, and identify future research directions.