Introduction to system architecture for a robotic computer

Recently, there have been a variety of products and research prototypes to introducé a new type of computing device in our living environment. Robots have great potential to be used as a new type of devices. In this paper, we introducé our on-going development of the robotic computer that naturally interacts with users, understands the current situation of users and environments, and proactively provides users with services. The proposed robotic computer consists of a control unit and an agent unit. The control unit, which is a remote processing server connected to the host server of the smart environment, provides memory (high-level information) and processing (computing resources) capabilities to the agent unit. The agent unit is a portable device that is wirelessly connected to the control unit, and interacts with users and physical objects. We describe the system architecture and the implementation of a proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed robotic computer.