# An ROS-based Shared Communication Middleware for Plug & Play Modular Intelligent Design of Smart Systems

## TL;DR

This paper presents a flexible, modular communication middleware based on ROS for smart systems, enabling plug-and-play integration, improved reconfigurability, and higher-level reasoning for smart offices and homes.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture that integrates automated planning into smart systems, enhancing flexibility and fault tolerance over traditional centralized designs.

## Key findings

- Demonstrated on a real-world smart office system
- Enhanced re-configurability and fault tolerance
- Embedded reasoning capabilities in system design

## Abstract

Centralized architectures for systems such as smart offices and homes are rapidly becoming obsolete due to inherent inflexibility in their design and management. This is because such systems should not only be easily re-configurable with the addition of newer capabilities over time but should also have the ability to adapt to multiple points of failure. Fully harnessing the capabilities of these massively integrated systems requires higher level reasoning engines that allow them to plan for and achieve diverse long-term goals, rather than being limited to a few predefined tasks. In this paper, we propose a set of properties that will accommodate such capabilities, and develop a general architecture for integrating automated planning components into smart systems. We show how the reasoning capabilities are embedded in the design and operation of the system and demonstrate the same on a real-world implementation of a smart office.