Modular Artefacts

Inspired by adaptive possibilities of agents in multi-agents system, we have developed the new concept of modular artefacts using intelligent building blocks (I-BLOCKS) [1]. This paper describes early a scientific research related to technical design, inheritable development and evaluation of a concept of neighborhood information awareness among I-BLOCKS allowing users to develop modular systems. The processing technology presented in this paper is embedded inside each DUPLO brick by housing microprocessor as well as adding selected sensors and actuators. Behavior of an IBLOCKS modular structure is defined by the internal processing functionality of each I-Block in such structure and communication capacities between I-BLOCKS. Users of the I-BLOCKS system can do “programming by building” and thereby create specific functionalities of a modular structure of artefacts without the need to learn and use traditional programming language. From approaching different fields e.g. modular robotic system, ubiquitous computing, etc, IBLOCKS may have potential possibilities to apply for many distributed modular systems. To illustrate these possibilities, the paper presents different scenarios in which modular artefacts have been used to set-up: information awareness of modular robotic system, exploration of behavior among mobile robot group, localization of a moveable artefact and reconfigurable context awareness. The paper reports briefly about earlier experiments of I-BLOCKS in different research fields, allowing users to construct distributed systems by using modular artefacts.