5. Integrating Robots and WSN: Communication and Interfacing Aspects

In the context of RADIO project, seamless integration of Robotic platform, heterogenous home automation technologies and diverse back infrastructures comprised an integral challenge to the success of the overall endeavor. This observation gave the involved partners the chance to explore difference technological and design approaches in order to yield the optimum implementation. At the same time, it highlighted the need to follow a structured, multifaceted approach in order to tackle efficiently all requirements. Based on this process, the main objective of this chapter is to present the most important lessons learned as well as emphasize on the key aspects where enhancements and novel contributions were achieved in RADIO. Therefore, in the first section, after the conceptual communication architecture defined in RADIO is presented, critical communication requirements of the RADIO platform are identified focusing on local area ultra-low power communication technologies deployed in the home premises as well as efficient cloud infrastructure utilized. Then the second section highlights the actual state-of-the-art communication technologies explored, deployed, and integrated in the context of RADIO platform emphasizing on bridging and coexistence critical challenges encountered and addressed. Focusing on the integration problem the RADIO Gateway entity represented one of the most important cornerstones for the overall RADIO platform performance effectively comprising a highly complex compound entity, adequately analyzed in Sect. 5.3. Then in Sect. 5.4 important research activities based on BLE communication technology are presented, enabling, on one hand, accurate indoor localization and, on the other hand, extended coverage area capabilities through multi-hop communication. Finally, Sect. 5.5 presents all development and integration effort devoted by RADIO partners to the backend infrastructure. Although, many times, not highlighted adequately, backend infrastructure is a critical part of the overall architecture since it effectively comprises the bases for key services such as, data storage, data processing, data representation, network management, network configuration, etc.