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Cooperating Objects
A major future technological trend will be to embed communication and computation processes within miniature objects.
This will lead to the creation of situated and cooperating 'smart' objects with sensing and actuating capabilities able to perceive and control their environment. Such concealed smart devices are the basic building blocks for environments with embedded intelligence and will link the digital world of the Internet with the real world.
Because of the vast number of distinct, wireless networked sensing and actuating devices and their rather limited resource capacity, isolated entities can no longer perform this interaction efficiently or reach the required distributed control objectives. As a result, cooperation between individual entities is a necessity, for energy-efficient, distributed monitoring and control tasks in large-scale systems. Cooperating objects are fundamental to embedded systems where everyday objects can be endowed with computational capacity; wireless communication and advanced control techniques.
The central aim of systems of cooperating objects will be to develop ambient intelligence technology that can "glue" together diverse objects to enable seamless environments for computing, communication and service delivery. Such technology should be open, distributed and scalable, naturally integrating heterogeneous devices ranging from tiny actuators to large computers. It will combine architectures, operating systems, middleware, programming models and tools to support location and context sensitivity, timely reactivity and pro-activeness, real-time adaptation and security. Objects should be seen as encapsulating entities, mixing hardware and software in any proportion and at any level of complexity. So, an object may be as simple as a sensor, as complex as a portable device, or even an entire car or building.
Projects in Cooperating Objects.
- Sentient Future competition (organised by the Embedded Wisent project in 2006)
- Embedded WiSeNTs research roadmap (PDF, 1.925KB)
- Co-operating objects workshop, 23-24 June 2005
- Presentation by Corinna Amting in Berlin on 20.01.2004 (PDF, 1.672KB)
- Consultation meeting held on 24 March 2004
- End Meeting Report and Conclusions (PDF, 42KB)