A Communication Framework for the Robotic Mediator collaborating with Smart Environments

In order to enable network robots to effectively collaborate with smart environments, it is crucial that various types of heterogeneous device platforms can communicate each other in flexible and efficient manners. Most of existing software platforms for network robots adopted general-purpose middlewares such as CORBA, which are not suitable to the communication between robots and smart environments due to their heavy size and complexity. Moreover, they do not provide network robot-specific features. Therefore, we propose a new TCP-based Remote Method Invocation framework. We devide the middleware into two layers i. e. transport layers and rmi layers and provide key features to each layer so that network robots can effectively communicate with various devices in smart environments.