Section: Dissemination

Transfer

Diffuse Robotics

Dissemination of the Hop technology has become a priority for the team now that Hop is actually used to develop large projects. In 2012, a further step was taken with the allocation of dedicated resources missioned to develop and transfer the application portfolio to the industry. The team has focused on bringing web awareness to personal assistance robots developed by the Coprin team, also at Inria CRISAM, in line with one of the top strategic orientations of Inria. Using web protocols as a native framework greatly simplifies the integration of the robot as a web entity, and the use of remote web services to manage, monitor or extend the features of the robot. The behavior of a Hop robot is specified in Hop and orchestrated within diffuse Hop run time agents embedded within the robot elements, in charge of handling communication and control between platforms and with remote web services. The project, code-named Diffuse Robotics, builds on the experience gained in using Hop for home automation over the recent years, adding in 2012 the support of versatile robotic computing platforms and associated mechanics and sensor hardware and a state of the art plug and play framework for automatic device and service discovery. Among the direct benefits of relying on a web framework are the ability to use any web enabled device such as a smartphone or tablet to drive the robot. Also, it is much simpler to put in place remote diagnostic and monitoring services by leveraging on existing robot sensors and the Hop framework.