Imagine a future. Your day begins with a pet robot playing an intelligent alarm system consisting of your favorite piece of music. As you get dressed, it comes up with today’s newspaper and the schedule for today. During the day you can keep tab on the security of the home, monitoring the security robot, through your mobile phone/personal digital assistant. While you are away, cleaning robots unobtrusively go about cleaning your home. Fresh orders for food items are automatically made over the internet to the local supermarket based on your desired food schedule. As you return, your assistive robot then aids you for a wide variety of tasks including cooking. You then later go to bed, relaxed with the knowledge that these electromechanical servants shall ceaselessly work towards enhancing your quality of life.

No, this intriguing vision is not from a Speilberg movie, and is far closer than you think. The key technology realizing these dreams is the radical new field of Ubiquitous Technology. Ubiquitous technology is poised to radically change our lives. In this coming era, it is not difficult to envision highly advanced robot systems, providing us with a variety of services, at any place, by any device, and whenever needed. Ubiquitous robotic systems are emerging and hold great promise for offering integrated services. These systems negate the necessity for the conventional notion of a stand-alone robot platform. They incorporate three forms of robots, i.e. the software robot (Sobot), embedded robot (Embot) and mobile robot (Mobot). This tripartite decomposition is the key to harnessing this new paradigm. This can be conceptualized as a networked cooperative robot system. The core intelligence of this system is constituted by software robots. Distributed Embot embedded robot sensors ensure that the Sobots possess context aware perceptive capabilities. Lastly, the mobile Mobots act upon the service requests in the physical domain. Networking technology such as the IPv6 format and Broadband wireless systems shall constitute the key leveraging these advancements.

Ubiquitous robots will thus be able to understand what the user needs, even without the issuance of a direct command, and be able to supply continuous and seamless service. Key to

its efficacy is that each component subsystem has a uniquely defined role. The Sobot, can be visualized as a 3D virtual pet, can connect to and be transmitted to any device, at any time and, at any place within the u-space, by maintaining its own unique IP address. It is context aware and can automatically and calmly provide services to the user. Embots collect and synthesize sensory information through the detection, recognition and authentication of users and other robots. Mobots proceed to act by providing the general users with integrated services. Middleware enables the Ubibot to interact and manage data communication reliably without disrupting the protocols in the u-space.
A number of research teams world over, including the robotics group at KAIST, Republic of Korea are working to take the lead in this rapidly emerging field. The consumer robotics industry itself though, is still in its infancy, but its potential is vast. It is but a matter of time before ubiquitous robotics delivers the killer app, just as the computer industry did so few decades earlier. The popular mythological tales, the Arabian Nights, spoke of a mythical creature, the Genie, emerging from within a magical lamp, which would satisfy all of our desires. Future systems, such as those based on the Ubibot, may very well realize this ancient dream through its immense capabilities of context-aware, calm, networked service available, at anytime, anyplace and whenever desired. Without a doubt, this technology is poised to completely transform our lives, permanently for the better in the years to come.
About the Author: Naveen Suresh kuppuswamy is MS student of ‘Robot Intelligence Technology (RIT) Lab’, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea. He can be reached at: naveen@rit.kaist.ac.kr