An Introduction to Patterns for the Internet of Robotic Things in the Ambient Assisted Living Scenario

The Internet of Things paradigm envisions the interoperation among objects, people, and their surrounding environment. In the last decade, the spread of IoT-based solutions has been supported in various domains and scenarios by academia, industry, and standards-setting organizations. The wide variety of applications and the need for a higher level of autonomy and interaction with the environment have recently led to the rise of the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT), where smart objects become autonomous robotic systems. As mentioned in the recent literature, many of the proposed solutions in the IoT field have to tackle similar challenges regarding the management of resources, interoperation among objects, and interaction with users and the environment. Given that, the concept of the IoT pattern has recently been introduced. In software engineering, a pattern is defined as a general solution that can be applied to a class of common problems. It is a template suggesting a solution for the same problem occurring in different contexts. Similarly, an IoT pattern provides a guide to design an IoT solution with the difference that the software is not the only element involved. Starting from this idea, we propose the novel concept of the IoRT pattern. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt at pattern authoring in the Internet of Robotic Things context. We focus on pattern identification by abstracting examples also in the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) scenario. A case study providing an implementation of the proposed patterns in the AAL context is also presented and discussed.