La rencontre de l’intelligence ambiante et de la robotique d’assistance a donné naissance à ce que nous avons appelé robotique ambiante d’assistance car destinée à assister une personne en perte d’autonomie. Elle s’appuie sur l’existence de réseaux d’objets communicants présents dans l’environnement de la personne pour décliner un ensemble de services et de téléservices destinés à faciliter la vie quotidienne de cette personne et de son entourage. Un, voir plusieurs robots peuvent être présents dans cet environnement. Une communauté scientifique récente s’est construite autour de la robotique ubiquitaire. Tandis que les robots des générations précédentes ont été conçus pour réaliser des tâches spécifiques et construits en tant qu’unité indépendante, la nouvelle génération vise l’ubiquité. L’autonomie du robot est obtenue par une interaction étroite entre le robot et l’environnement ambiant communicant. Dans le contexte de l’intelligence ambiante, les objets communicants de l’environnement peuvent jouer un rôle "facilitateur" en aidant le robot à se localiser, naviguer, rechercher un objet. Inversement, le robot peut être vu comme un objet communicant qui est mis à contribution par des services autres que l’assistance à la personne en perte d’autonomie. Ainsi le premier objectif de cette thèse est de proposer une architecture informatique permettant la coopération entre le robot et les objets communicants présents dans l’environnement tels que les capteurs ou les actionneurs. Le deuxième objectif est de proposer une méthode de localisation par coopération robot-environnement communicant. Notre ambition est de localiser avec certitude le robot dans une zone de l’habitat. / The meeting of ambient intelligence and assistive robotics gave birth to ambient assistive robotics which aims at assisting a person in loss of autonomy. It relies on the existence network of communicating objects present in the environment of the person. The objective is to propose a set of services and teleservices for facilitating the person's daily life. One or more robots can be present in this environment. Previous generation of robots have been designed to perform tasks specific and built as an independent unit, while the new generation of robots tries to take advantage of ubiquity. In this framework, the robot autonomy is obtained by a close interaction between the robot and the ambient environment. Up to recent years the robot moved in a rather hostile environment which did not facilitate its task. In the context of ambient intelligence, the communicating objects of ambient environment can play a "facilitator" role in helping the assistive robot for locating itself, searching for a person … Conversely, the robot can be seen as a communicating object which is used by services to the person in loss of autonomy. The first objective of this thesis is to propose an architecture for cooperation between the robot and communicating objects and the second objective is to propose a localization method by cooperation of ambient environment and a mobile robot.

Zugl.: Kaiserslautern, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2008

This thesis explores the trajectory that the developing technological fields of Ambient Intelligence and Persuasive Technologies introduce new intricate relationships beyond fundamental use and availability because they change our abilities to act. Since its classic articulation by Hegel (1927) philosophical explication of the relationship between people and technology states that technology is a mediating factor between people and the world. Associated with this view, which has characterized the resulting phenomenology and philosophy of technology for nearly two decades, is an understanding of technology as a form of alienation. In this dissertation the author shows how this old interpretation of the relationship between a person and their tool has emphasized how the person is active whilst the tool is passive. This traditional distinction fails to grasp the complex interaction between people and technology in the contemporary world. The nature of new technologies and novel theoretical work in this field suggests that this critical framework is now inadequate. Today, technology mediates the relationship between people and the world in increasingly complex and often collective ways. McLuhan (1967) stated: “Media evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one of these senses alters the way we think and act”. As Greenfield (2006) and Fogg (2002) also posit, certain Ambient Intelligence and Persuasive Technologies are in-principle shaping everyday human behaviours in radically new ways. In particular, I explore how new technologies like those developed in the Artificial Companions Project can impact on our understanding of intimacy and identity. Indeed, Ambient Intelligence Technologies may play the role of reference groups (Shibutani 1987), groups who are real or imaginary and whose standpoints are being used as the frame of reference for the human actor. Given that these technologies have continuously reconfigured identification and profiling practices, this analysis rephrases insight of philosophers like Paul Ricoeur (1990), George Herbert Mead (1959) and Helmuth Plessner (1975) to trace how: The construction of our identity is mediated by how we profile others as profiling us. Thus, new technologies can become reference groups, encroaching on our everyday activities and even affecting our moral decision-making processes. As genuine upgrades of our practical space, they are destined to play a larger formative role in people’s lives in the future. Following Heidegger in Das Ding (Heidegger 1951), Latour once framed the wider social role of technologies as res publica or ‘public things’ (Latour 2005). He pointed out that the old German word ‘ding’ etymologically did not only infer ‘material object’ but also to assembly as gathering space - that thing that can bring together what it separates. Following Latour, Verbeek states that technological ‘things’ do not only mediate our existence, but are places where these mediations are made explicit – therefore, Verbeek argues, they are the places where people have to start to discuss and criticise the quality of the ways in which these ‘things’ help to shape our daily lives (Verbeek 2008). This thesis attempts to offer a new approach to this criticism through theoretical comparison and transdisciplinary analysis.

L'informatique sensible au contexte vise à réduire la quantité d'informations explicites qu'un utilisateur doit fournir pour que le système accomplisse la tâche souhaitée. Ceci est particulièrement vrai dans le domaine récent de l'intelligence ambiante où les objets de la vie courante deviennent capables de déclencher une action ou un échange spontané d'informations, sans interaction avec l'utilisateur. Les progrès techniques en matière de réseaux de communication sans fil, d'équipements mobiles individuels, de capteurs et de logiciels embarqués, rendent aujourd'hui possibles des services aux usagers dépendants du contexte, mais les applications concrètes demeurent encore très limitées. Les travaux existants dans la littérature décomposent la gestion de contexte en quatre fonctionnalités: la collecte, l'interprétation, la détection de situations et l'utilisation pour l'adaptation. L'élément discriminant des solutions existantes est la qualité des informations abstraites obtenues par inférence et devant caractériser les situations de l'utilisateur. Les limites de ces solutions sont le manque de composition aisée des informations de contexte, le passage à l'échelle, tant en termes de quantité d'informations de contexte que de nombre d'applications clientes, l'absence de garantie sur la cohérence et la qualité des informations de contexte, et le manque de solutions intergicielles permettant de libérer le concepteur d'applications des aspects liés à la gestion de contexte. Nous nous intéressons dans cette thèse à la gestion de la qualité de contexte (QoC) dans un environnement ambiant. Les problématiques de gestion de la qualité de contexte sont multiples: choisir la méthode adéquate pour la gestion du contexte, extraire la qualité associée au contexte, interpréter et analyser la qualité de contexte pour les applications sensibles au contexte. Nous proposons de répondre à ces problématiques en intégrant la qualité de contexte au sein de la plateforme de gestion de contexte COSMOS (http://picoforge.lntevrv.fr/proiects/svn/cosmos) de l'équipe MARGE (http://www-inf.itsudparis.eu/MARGE) de Télécom SudParis. Afin d'effectuer cette intégration, nous avons conçu des éléments spécifiques à la qualité de contexte et avons mis en place une gestion fine et efficiente de cette qualité en limitant le surcoût associé. Nous proposons également un processus de conception basé sur l'ingénierie dirigée par les modèles afin de générer les éléments requis à la gestion de la qualité de contexte. Nous avons validé nos contributions à l'aide de deux applications fonctionnant sur téléphone mobile : une application de "vente flash" dans un centre commercial et une application de détection de localisation sur un campus. Les tests de performances que nous avons effectués permettent de comparer les résultats avec et sans la prise en compte de la QoC et montrent le faible coût de la gestion de la qualité par rapport aux améliorations apportées aux applications sensibles au contexte / Context-aware computing aims to reduce the amount of explicit information required from a user for a system to perform a task. This is particularly true in the recent domain of ambient intelligence where everyday life objects are able to trigger an action or a spontaneous information exchange, without any interaction with the user. Technical advances in wireless communication, personal mobile devices, sensors and embedded software make context-aware services possible, but concrete applications are still very limited. The solutions proposed in the literature decompose context management into four functions: acquisition, interpretation, situation detection and application adaptation. The differentiating element in these proposals is the quality of the high-level context information obtained by inference and characterising the situation of the user. The limits of these solutions are the difficulty for composing context information scalability in terms of the quantity of context information and of the number of client applications, the absence of guarantee on the consistency of context information and the lack of middleware solutions able to free the designer of context-aware applications from the management of context data. In this thesis, we are interested in the management of the quality of context information (QoC) in an ambient environment. There are several key issues in QoC management: choosing the adequate method for context management, extracting the quality associated to the context, analysing and interpreting the quality of the context with regard to the requirements of context-aware applications. We propose to answer these questions by integrating QoC management into the COSMOS context management framework (http://picoforge.int-evry.fr/projects/svn/cosmos) developed by the MARGE team (http://www-inf.itsudparis.eu/MARGE) of Télécom SudParis.For this purpose, we have designed the necessary components dedicated to QoC management and we have implemented the mechanisms allowing a fine-grain manipulation of the QoC together with a limitation of the associated overhead. We also propose a design process based on model-driven engineering in order to automatically generate the elements responsible of QoC management. We validate our contributions through the development of two prototype applications running on mobile phones: a Flash sale offer application to be used in malls and a location detection application proposed to the students of a campus. The performance tests we have conducted allow to compare the results obtained with and without taking into account the QoC and show the low overhead associated to QoC manaqement with regard to the benefits brought to context-aware applications and services

<p>This report presents the existence of a set of problems making the growth of the domotic field more difficult. They are mainly the lack of a common communication standard among devices and the existence of a proprietary market, where each provider focuses on developing its own devices, protocols and interfaces.</p><p>There isn’t a convergence criterion in order to overcome this problem by the main domotic providers. Several studies try to overcome this problem by applying different strategies. This study analyses the main strategies followed in that field, concluding with a model that combines them. The model is based on the use of OPC and web services.</p>

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Zugl.: Kaiserslautern, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2008

Zugl.: Darmstadt, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2007 u.d.T.: Hellenschmidt, Michael: Software-Infrastruktur und Entwicklungsumgebung für selbstorganisierende multimediale Ensembles in Ambient-Intelligence-Umgebungen / Hergestellt on demand

This report presents the existence of a set of problems making the growth of the domotic field more difficult. They are mainly the lack of a common communication standard among devices and the existence of a proprietary market, where each provider focuses on developing its own devices, protocols and interfaces. There isn’t a convergence criterion in order to overcome this problem by the main domotic providers. Several studies try to overcome this problem by applying different strategies. This study analyses the main strategies followed in that field, concluding with a model that combines them. The model is based on the use of OPC and web services.

Zugl.: München, Univ., Diss., 2008