Robots, Objects, Humans: Towards Seamless Interaction in Intelligent Environments - Supporting Complex Cooperative Interactions between Humans and Technical Systems in Real World Scenarios through Cognitive Objects

Future intelligent environments will be inhabited by humans, robots and ‘Smart Objects’ and allow for seamless interaction beyond the desktop. These environments therefore have to be adaptive, self-organizing, provide autonomous reasoning and integrate a variety of heterogenous hardware, objects, sensors and actuators – which goes far beyond merely interconnecting different kinds of technology. In light of the dawn of personal robotics, these environments should be equally usable and supportive for humans and robots. Manipulation tasks involving physical objects are at core of the interaction in these environments. This places novel challenges on the involved ‘Smart Objects’. We present an approach for supporting robotic systems in the interaction with physical objects while maintaining human usability and functionality by using so-called ‘Cognitive Objects’. We describe our infrastructure to support developing, simulating, testing and deploying of pervasive computing systems, using ROS (Robot Operating System) as middleware, and present several application scenarios. The scenarios are not limited to the robotics domain, but include location-aware services, intelligent environments and mobile interaction therein. Based on our experience, recommendations for the design of ‘Cognitive Objects’ (CO) and environments are given, to address the individual strengths of humans and machines and to foster new synergies in shared human-robot environments.