PEIS Home Simulator - Örebro universitet

1 Introduction
1.1 Context
1.1.1 PEIS
PEIS is an abbreviation for “Physically Embedded Intelligent System”. A PEIS is a device capable
of doing some computing and communication. A PEIS may, or may not, be able to affect/sense the
environment through sensors. Using some uniform communications model all PEIS sharing an
environment are able to exchange information and access resources of one another. 1
1.1.2 PEIS Ecology
The idea of a PEIS ecology is to have an environment filled with PEIS and instead of having each
individual component working by itself to perform tasks they work together to achieve goals. En
example scenario:
” Johanna is 76 years old, and she lives in a small house. Soon before she wakes up, her
fridge realizes that there is little milk left and sends a request for a new bottle to the local
store. Johanna’s autonomous trolley goes to the store and fetches the milk together with the
usual newspaper. When Johanna gets out of bed, her motion is detected and the coffee
machine starts to brew coffee. A team of kitchen robots bring bread, butter, jam and coffee
on the table. When Johanna walks out of the bathroom, she finds her breakfast ready. She
hears the cleaning robot that cleans the bathroom after her.” 1
Individual PEIS in the ecology need not be complex. With cooperation complex tasks, difficult for a
single PEIS, can be accomplished by the ecology as a whole.
One way too look at this is that instead of having some sort of intelligent robotic system helping in
an environment, the whole environment is an intelligent robotic system.
1.1.3 The PEIS Home
The PEIS Home is a real world demonstration environment built for research of PEIS technology as
part of the “PEIS-Ecology project” at the AASS Mobile Robotics Lab at Örebro Universitet. It is
built to resemble part of a modern apartment home. It has a kitchen, bedroom and living area. There
is an observation area on one side of the room that is not considered to be an actual part of the home
(not part of the simulated environment). As part of the “PEIS-Ecology project” a uniform
communication and cooperation model was developed. Called the PEIS kernel this model is a runtime
library that acts as middleware for all components in the ecology.
1 PEIS Ecologies: Ambient Intelligence meets Autonomous Robotics, Alessandro Saffiotti & Mathias Broxvall
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