To ease teaching self-organizing systems design, we implemented the AntNet routing algorithm for real-world application using educational robots called ActivityBot. Using line sensors and ultrasonic distance sensors, the robotic ants traverse a tiled graph printed on paper, collectively converging to the shortest path. In our descriptions, we address the challenges to face when employing such self-organizing systems on educational hardware and provide a video on YouTube https://youtu.be/JFduHJ0o0UM.
Through the mechanisms of the Semantic Web, it is possible not only to describe web content syntactically but also to relate it semantically. The properties and capabilities of hardware, instead, are hidden in documents, code documentations, repository descriptions, etc. This paper presents a methodology and architecture that can be used to describe and relate the properties and capabilities of hardware. The decentralized storage of the descriptions on a hardware adapter allows the information to be evaluated at runtime. For domain-specific applications a Model-Domain-Domainmodel Architecture (MDDM) is presented so that code can also be executed at runtime using these hardware descriptions. The architecture is presented using a home automation system with single-board computers and microcontrollers, in which sensors and actuators can be exchanged and integrated.
