Indirect Reference: Reconfiguring Distributed Sensors and Actuators

Many sensor networks have lately included actuation as an important property of the nodes. With the introduction of actuation, new requirements are posed on these nodes in terms of reconfiguration of collaboration patterns. The sensors/actuators are very often connected to various heterogeneous hardware that have a few KBs of memory, low processing power and communication range, such as WSN motes. Also, for many applications networks of small and simple sensor and actuator nodes need to cooperate with networked robotic devices, which leads to further requirements to enable collaboration between devices of different scales. In this networked robot and sensor/actuator infrastructure, tasks are performed by the cooperation of multiple devices. Dynamically changing availability of devices as well as changes of tasks lead to a need of reconfiguration of the devices at runtime. Therefore a mechanism should be available in the communication level, which affords reconfiguration ability to the sensor/actuator nodes as well as robots. In this article, a concept called indirect reference is proposed, which facilitates dynamic reconfiguration of sets of distributed devices. We describe here also an implementation of the concept on a ubiquitous robotic middleware, which offers seamless integration of robots and WSN motes like tiny embedded devices with an example.