Internet of robotic things-converging sensing/actuating, hyperconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing new developments in various application domains, such as the Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous System of Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internet of Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc. that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influence represents new development and deployment challenges in different areas such as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration, new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification (addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and many others. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication of multiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating, their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safety and protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/ communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrency require new ideas for integrating the intelligent "devices", collaborative robots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing, self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configuration and context based IoT systems for service implementation and integration with IoT network service composition are of paramount importance when new "cognitive devices" are becoming active participants in IoT applications. This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies, architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage of future challenges, developments and applications.