The term “Cooperating Objects” was coined explicitly for the purpose of describing such systems by the 12 members of the Embedded WiSeNts Consortium, a Coordination Action funded by the EC between September 1st, 2004 and December 31st, 2006 as part of the 6th Framework Programme. One of the main results of this Coordination Action was the publishing of the Embedded WiSeNts Research Roadmap that defines the concept of Cooperating Objects in the following way:“In the abstract sense, a Cooperating Object is a single entity or a collection of entities consisting of:
that communicate with each other and are able to achieve, more or less autonomously, a common goal.
More precisely, sensors are devices that act as inputs to the Cooperating Object and are able to gather and retrieve information either from other Cooperating Objects or from the environment. Controllers are devices that act as data or information processors and, obviously, must interact with sensors and actuators in order to be able to interact with their environment. Furthermore, controllers are equipped with some kind of storage device that allows them to perform their tasks. The amount of “effort” devoted by a particular controller to either information processing or storage tasks is determined on an individual basis. This way, the sensor network might be composed of controllers that mostly provide information processing capabilities, whereas others might be specialised in the storage of data. Finally, actuators are devices that act as output producers and are able to interact and modify their environment.
It seems clear that if sensors, controllers and actuators need to interact with each other in a distributed environment, all of them need to be equipped with communication capabilities. These might of course be based on wired or wireless technology. The inclusion of other cooperating objects as part of a cooperating object itself indicates that these objects can combine their sensors, controllers and actuators in a hierarchical way and are, therefore, able to create arbitrarily complex structures.”
The Sensor Networks and Pervasive Computing research group is part of the Institut für Informatik (IV) at the Universität Bonn and is also part of the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS). The group is headed by Prof. Dr. Pedro José Marrón and, as of January 2008, it consists of seven full-time researchers. Besides from offering various courses at the undergraduate and graduate level, the group is actively performing foundational and applied research in the field of Cooperating Objects.