The Ubiquitous Network Robot Platform: Common platform for continuous daily robotic services

This paper proposes a common infrastructure for robotic services to support our daily life: the Ubiquitous Network Robot Platform (UNR-PF). UNR-PF enables the design and development of robotic services that interact with people throughout our daily activities in various environments by utilizing networked robot systems including robots, sensor networks, smartphones, etc. In this paper, we first describe the requirements for UNR-PF from our past research through various field studies with networked robot systems. These requirements include appropriate abstraction and classification of robotic functions, information sharing and management between different services in distributed areas, and a common management facility for the networked robot devices based on their capabilities and availabilities. On the basis of these requirements, we have implemented a prototype system and have been running several real-world case studies. These field tests showed that the proposed UNR-PF is effective for continuously supporting our daily activities across multiple areas. Recent activities toward standardizing the key elements of UNR-PF are also described.