Clemens Holzmann Spatial Awareness of Autonomous Embedded Systems VIEWEG+TEUBNER RESEARCH Clemens Holzmann Spatial Awareness of Autonomous Embedded Systems VIEWEG+TEUBNER RESEARCH Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Dissertation Universität Linz, 2008 1st Edition 2009 All rights reserved © Vieweg+Teubner | GWV Fachverlage GmbH, Wiesbaden 2009 Editorial Office: Christel A Roß | Anita Wilke Vieweg+Teubner is part of the specialist publishing group Springer Science+Business Media www.viewegteubner.de No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder Registered and/or industrial names, trade names, trade descriptions etc cited in this publication are part of the law for trade-mark protection and may not be used free in any form or by any means even if this is not specifically marked Cover design: KünkelLopka Medienentwicklung, Heidelberg Printing company: STRAUSS GMBH, Mörlenbach Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-8348-0798-4 To my mother and father, who have always believed in me and supported me all the way Thank you Acknowledgements I would like to especially thank the following people who contributed to this thesis in various ways and without whose support it would not have been possible to finish it in such a short time and with the present extent and quality: • My supervisor Univ.-Prof Mag Dr Alois Ferscha, for giving me the opportunity to work at his department and supporting me in every way with this dissertation He offered me an interesting topic to work on, provided generous financial support with regard to the professional equipment I could use in my research as well as for being able to publish and present results at international conferences, he was always available for discussions, helped with useful suggestions to keep the thesis on track and in time, and allowed me to realize and develop my ideas in an industrial research project with Siemens AG Germany Last but not least, he gave me all the time I needed when actually writing the thesis • Dipl.-Ing Manfred Hechinger, who implemented major parts of the software framework presented in Chapter as well as the vibro-tactile space awareness application presented in Section 7.2 Also the framework architecture and many of the related concepts were developed in close cooperation with him • Univ.-Prof Mag Dr Gabriele Kotsis, for reading this thesis as the second supervisor and being a great help particularly in its initial stage by providing her expertise with regard to technical issues and writing a dissertation in general • The project partners of Siemens AG Germany, and in particular Dipl.-Inform Dr Andreas Zeidler, for their critical and useful feedback on parts of my work as well as for sharing their knowledge on real-world requirements • The co-authors and reviewers of my publications, who provided helpful suggestions for their improvement and thus also contributed to a higher quality of the respective sections in this thesis I would like to especially thank the reviewers of my submission to the Ubicomp 2005 doctoral colloquium, VIII Acknowledgements who suggested to extend my sole focus on the spatial direction of artifacts at that time to different types of spatial relationships and anchor the work in real-world application domains • Dominik Hochreiter and Dipl.-Ing (FH) Bernadette Emsenhuber for their work on realizing the hardware of the vibro-tactile belt (cf Section 7.2.1), and in this regard Dipl.-Ing Andreas Riener for bringing in his expertise on haptic perception • My partner Mag Anja Razenböck, for supporting me emotionally and showing understanding for the many evenings and weekends I was working on this thesis • All the colleagues I have come to know since my employment at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, who contributed to an inspirational and pleasant working environment and made the time at the university enjoyable and fruitful Dipl.-Ing Mag Clemens Holzmann Abstract The invisible integration of technology into everyday objects like home appliances, cars and mobile phones, which is the declared vision and fundament of research in the field of pervasive computing, leads to huge quantities of smart objects which are situated in the surrounding physical space Equipped with embedded systems technology, they become increasingly heterogeneous and interconnected, raising the challenge of a semantically meaningful interplay with each other In this thesis, such physical objects with embedded computing and communication technology are referred to as digital artifacts One approach to meet this challenge is to design and implement systems that are able to operate autonomously in the background, namely with as little human intervention as possible, and interact with humans in a more unobtrusive way In order to achieve autonomy, two aspects are particularly important: (i) context-awareness, which refers to the ability of a digital artifact to acquire environmental information in order to become aware of its situation and adapt to changing situations at runtime, and (ii) context sharing, which relates to an artifact’s ability of exchanging context information with other artifacts in communication range An essential part of the context of spatially distributed objects is their position, direction and spatial extension with respect to an external reference system or with respect to other objects The focus of this thesis is to make digital artifacts aware of such context information in order to enable their autonomous adaptation to spatial changes in the environment, whereas our main interest is on qualitatively abstracted spatial relations and their use at the application level Concepts for recognizing, representing and reasoning about qualitative spatial relations among autonomous artifacts and their changes over time are presented, as well as an according architecture which has been implemented in a flexible software framework that builds upon qualitative relationship abstractions and the rule-based inference of conclusions from them Special attention is paid to the adaptivity to different application domains, which influence the semantics of spatial abstractions and thus the behavior of digital artifacts Evaluation results show the feasibility of the proposed concepts for developing spatially aware applications which involve one or more spontaneously interacting digital artifacts, and in particular that qualitatively abstracted relations can constitute an adequate basis for it Contents Introduction 1.1 Problem Statement 1.2 Contribution 1.3 Thesis Outline Spatial Awareness 2.1 Context and Awareness 2.2 Autonomous Embedded Systems 2.2.1 Exchange of Self-Descriptions 2.3 Mechanisms of Self-Organization 2.3.1 Self-Organization in Space 2.4 Spatial Context in Time 2.5 An Architecture for Spatial Awareness 2.6 Related Work 2.6.1 Projects 2.6.2 Comparison 9 12 15 16 19 20 23 26 27 41 Representation of Space 3.1 Quantitative Representation 3.1.1 Spatial Abstraction with Zones-of-Influence 3.1.2 Reference Systems for Position and Direction 3.2 Qualitative Representation 3.2.1 Qualitative Abstractions of Space 3.2.2 Recognition and Representation of Spatial Relations 3.2.3 Static and Dynamic Spatial Relations 3.2.4 Frames of Reference 3.2.5 Spatiotemporal Relations 3.3 Structure of Self-Descriptions 3.3.1 Quantitative Spatial Properties 3.3.2 Qualitative Spatial Relations 3.4 Summary 45 46 46 49 51 51 53 56 60 61 66 67 70 72 192 Bibliography [BBC97] Peter J Brown, John D Bovey, and Xian Chen Context-aware applications: From the laboratory to the marketplace IEEE 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from the interaction of all of them Mark Weiser, 1952-1999 This chapter introduces spatial awareness of autonomous embedded systems, which is the main subject of this work In Section 2.1, we first give an overview on context -awareness, which... feature of our work Actually, most of the known phenomena of self-organization and -adaptation in nature are phenomena of selforganization in space [MZ05], and [ZM04] identifies the concept of space and the awareness of distributed components of their surrounding to play an important role for mechanisms of self-organization, as for example the coordination of activities by exploiting their spatial structure... 191 List of Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Components of a digital artifact Exchange and comparison of self-descriptions Emerging “glider” pattern in “Game of Life” Static spatial properties and relations of artifacts General architecture for spatial awareness Zone -of- Influence for a car’s braking distance [FHR+ 08] Types of Zones -of- Influence... context goes through similar layers of abstraction until reaching the application, and a rule-based approach has been chosen for defining application-level behavior 2.2 Autonomous Embedded Systems As stated in the previous section, context -awareness is a crucial contributor to the autonomy of embedded systems, which are considered as computer systems that are parts of larger systems and realize dedicated... feasibility and quality of the Zones-ofInfluence Framework has been conducted 1.3 Thesis Outline The thesis is structured as follows Chapter 2 gives an introduction in contextawareness of autonomous embedded systems, with which physical objects are augmented and to which we refer to as digital artifacts then, motivates its significance for mechanisms of self-organization, discusses the role of spatial context... architecture for providing spatial awareness to artifacts At the end of this chapter, a comprehensive survey and comparison of related work are given Chapter 3 elaborates on quantitative and qualitative representations of spatial aspects, which are the basis for representing spatial properties of artifacts with so-called Zones -of- Influence as well as for recognizing and using spatial relations between... clear advantages whenever the spatial cognition of humans is involved [Mus00] or systems with limited computing resources are concerned [Fre92b], among others Summing up, the focus of this thesis can be stated as follows: What are concepts and architectures for making autonomous embedded systems aware of qualitatively abstracted spatial relations over time and using them in spatially aware applications?... with spatial context information, whereas a classification is given and our focus on spatial relations as well as their changes over time is emphasized Afterwards, an architecture for spatial awareness is presented in Section 2.5, and Section 2.6 finally provides a comprehensive survey and comparison of related work addressing the issue of how to make autonomous embedded systems aware about abstracted spatial. .. Context and Awareness Subject of the field of pervasive computing is the integration of technology into everyday objects With computing power invisibly integrated in a huge number of networked objects it becomes necessary that they operate more autonomously, 10 2 Spatial Awareness as the embedding of digital technology leads to constrained human-computer interfaces on the one hand, and the ubiquity of such... context of use A survey on the foundations of context-aware computing and first research projects is given in [CK00] Several definitions of context and awareness can be found in literature In the field of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), [DB92] considers an awareness of the others’ activities necessary for successful collaboration, and defines awareness as an understanding of the activities of others, ...Clemens Holzmann Spatial Awareness of Autonomous Embedded Systems VIEWEG+TEUBNER RESEARCH Clemens Holzmann Spatial Awareness of Autonomous Embedded Systems VIEWEG+TEUBNER RESEARCH... comparison of related work addressing the issue of how to make autonomous embedded systems aware about abstracted spatial relations over time 2.1 Context and Awareness Subject of the field of pervasive... 1952-1999 This chapter introduces spatial awareness of autonomous embedded systems, which is the main subject of this work In Section 2.1, we first give an overview on context -awareness, which denotes