Pervasive pheromone-based interaction with RFID tags

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.

[1]  Sherry Hsi,et al.  RFID enhances visitors' museum experience at the Exploratorium , 2005, CACM.

[2]  Roy Want,et al.  Enabling ubiquitous sensing with RFID , 2004, Computer.

[3]  Rick L. Riolo,et al.  Adaptive Competition, Market Efficiency, and Phase Transitions , 1999 .

[4]  MameiMarco,et al.  Pervasive pheromone-based interaction with RFID tags , 2007 .

[5]  Ronaldo Menezes,et al.  A new approach to scalable Linda-systems based on swarms , 2003, SAC '03.

[6]  R. Matthews,et al.  Ants. , 1898, Science.

[7]  Bernhard Nebel,et al.  RFID Technology-based Exploration and SLAM for Search And Rescue , 2006, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[8]  H. Van Dyke Parunak,et al.  "Go to the ant": Engineering principles from natural multi-agent systems , 1997, Ann. Oper. Res..

[9]  Roy Want,et al.  An introduction to RFID technology , 2006, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[10]  Franco Zambonelli,et al.  Physical deployment of digital pheromones through RFID technology , 2005, SIS.

[11]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Mapping and localization with RFID technology , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[12]  H. Van Dyke Parunak,et al.  Digital Pheromones for Coordination of Unmanned Vehicles , 2004, E4MAS.

[13]  James McLurkin,et al.  Distributed Algorithms for Dispersion in Indoor Environments Using a Swarm of Autonomous Mobile Robots , 2004, DARS.

[14]  John Nicholson,et al.  RFID in robot-assisted indoor navigation for the visually impaired , 2004, 2004 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37566).

[15]  Ichiro Satoh.  A location model for pervasive computing environments , 2005, Third IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications.

[16]  Danny Weyns,et al.  Gradient field-based task assignment in an AGV transportation system , 2006, AAMAS '06.

[17]  Christian Floerkemeier,et al.  RFID middleware design: addressing application requirements and RFID constraints , 2005, sOc-EUSAI '05.

[18]  Henry A. Kautz,et al.  Inferring activities from interactions with objects , 2004, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[19]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  From Natural to Artificial Swarm Intelligence , 1999 .

[20]  Franco Zambonelli,et al.  Making tuple spaces physical with RFID tags , 2006, SAC '06.

[21]  Hein Meling,et al.  Anthill: a framework for the development of agent-based peer-to-peer systems , 2002, Proceedings 22nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.

[22]  Graham P Collins,et al.  Next stretch for plastic electronics. , 2004, Scientific American.

[23]  Radhika Nagpal,et al.  Distributed construction by mobile robots with enhanced building blocks , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[24]  Wei-Min Shen,et al.  Hormone-inspired adaptive communication and distributed control for CONRO self-reconfigurable robots , 2002, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[25]  Frank Stajano,et al.  RFID is x-ray vision , 2005, CACM.

[26]  Mauro Birattari,et al.  Swarm Intelligence , 2012, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[27]  Qun Li,et al.  Distributed algorithms for guiding navigation across a sensor network , 2003, MobiCom '03.

[28]  Andrew S. Tanenbaum,et al.  The evolution of RFID security , 2006, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[29]  Sven Koenig,et al.  Building Terrain-Covering Ant Robots: A Feasibility Study , 2004, Auton. Robots.

[30]  H. Van Dyke Parunak,et al.  A Survey of Environments and Mechanisms for Human-Human Stigmergy , 2005, E4MAS.

[31]  F. Zambonelli,et al.  Spreading Pheromones in Everyday Environments through RFID Technology , 2005 .

[32]  Gaurav S. Sukhatme,et al.  Connecting the Physical World with Pervasive Networks , 2002, IEEE Pervasive Comput..

[33]  Tao Lin,et al.  Integrating Automatic Data Acquisition with Business Processes - Experiences with SAP's Auto-ID Infrastructure , 2004, VLDB.