Towards Autonomous IoT Logistics Objects

Abstract

To improve the overall impact of the Internet of Things (IoT), intelligent capabilities must be developed at the edge of the IoT ‘Cloud.' ‘Smart' IoT objects must not only communicate with their environment, but also use embedded knowledge to interpret signals, and by making inferences augment their knowledge of their own state and that of their environment. Thus, intelligent IoT objects must improve their capabilities to make autonomous decisions without reliance to external computing infrastructure. In this chapter, we illustrate the concept of smart autonomous logistic objects with a proof of concept prototype built using an embedded version of the Prolog language, running on a Raspberry Pi credit-card-sized single-board computer to which an RFID reader is attached. The intelligent object is combining the RFID readings from its environment with embedded knowledge to infer new knowledge about its status. We test the system performance in a simulated environment consisting of logistics objects.