As I was browsing through the ACM DL, I came across this paper called "Pervasive Pheromone-Based Interaction with RFID Tags" and actually got very excited about the idea of Pheromone-Based Interaction. The paper explains this interaction paradigm as follows: "Ants and other social insects interact by spreading chemical markers (i.e., pheromones) as they move in the environment and by being directed in their actions by the perceived concentrations of pheromones. This simple mechanism of local interactions mediated by the environment, called stigmergy, enables ants to globally self-organize their collective activities in a seemingly intelligent way and to adaptively act in an unknown environment". In summary, ants use this interaction model as a way of coordinating their activities, especially for food foraging. This paper presents a scenario where digital pheromones are stored in RFID tags and then used by humans/robots to find forgotten-somewhere objects by following pheromones trails associated with them. I thought this work could be an interest to people working on object tracking for disabled users and ofcourse to people like me who are interested in using interaction models from nature in new technological developments. Pervasive Pheromone-Based Interaction with RFID Tags

Despite the growing interest in pheromone-based interaction to enforce adaptive and context-aware coordination, the number of deployed systems exploiting digital pheromones to coordinate the activities of situated autonomous agents is still very limited. In this article, we present a simple low-cost and general-purpose implementation of a pheromone-based interaction mechanism for pervasive environments. This is realized by making use of RFID tags to store digital pheromones and by having humans or robots spread/sense pheromones by properly writing/reading RFID tags populating the surrounding physical environment. We exemplify and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach via an application for object-tracking. This application allows robots and humans to find forgotten-somewhere objects by following pheromones trails associated with them. In addition, we sketch further potential applications of our approach in pervasive computing scenarios, discuss related work in the area, and identify future research directions.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1242060.1242061
Full Proceedings: ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, Vol. 2, No. 2, Article 4, Publication date: June 2007

Labels: interaction, pervasive, phermone, RFID, tracking