A Player/Stage System for Context-Aware Intelligent Environments

The effective development and deployment of complex and heterogeneous ubiquitous computing applications is hindered by the lack of a comprehensive middleware infrastructure: interfaces to sensors are company specific and sometimes even product specific. Typically, these interfaces also do not sustain the development of robust systems that make use of sensor data fusion. In this paper, we propose the use of Player/Stage, a middleware commonly used as a de facto standard by the robotics community, as the backbone of a heterogeneous ubiquitous system. Player/Stage offers many features needed in ubicomp, mostly because dealing with uncertainty and many different sensor and actuator systems has been a long term problem in robotics as well. We emphasize they key features of the Player/Stage project, and show how ubicomp devices can be integrated into the system, as well as how existing devices can be used. Additionally, we present our sensor-enabled AwareKitchen environment which makes use of automatic data analysis algorithms integrated as drivers in the Player/Stage platform, of which we are active developers.