Knowledge-based auto-configuration system using ubiquitous robotics for services delivery in smart home

Abstract

The wide availability of services and devices within contemporary smart home environments makes their management a challenging and rewarding task. Maintaining complex smart home systems throughout their lifecycle entails considerable resources and effort. These challenges have stimulated the need for dynamic auto-configurable services amongst such distributed systems. This research aims to devise methods to automate the activities associated with customised service delivery for dynamic home environments by exploiting recent advances in the field of ubiquitous robotics and semantic web technologies. It introduces a novel approach called the knowledge-based auto-configuration ubiquitous robotics for smart home environments, which utilises the Sobot to achieve auto-configuration of the system. A proof-of-concept testbed has been designed, implemented and validated via several case studies. The results show that the Sobot is capable of creating and executing new or alternative feasible configurations to meet the system's goal by utilising inferred facts based on the smart home ontological model, so that the system can adapt to the changed environment.