Towards a Sentient Object Model

A sentient object is a mobile, intelligent software component that is able to sense its environment via sensors and react to sensed information via actuators. Sentient objects are context-aware, aware of both their internal state and the state of their surrounding local environment, and are cooperative, cooperating with other sentient objects both through traditional communication channels and via the physical environment. In this paper we describe a sentient object model and in doing so provide concrete definitions for the terms sensor, actuator, and sentient object as