Middleware Support for Generic Actuation in the Internet of Mobile Things

As the Internet of Things is expanding towards applications in almost any sector of our economy and daily life, so is the demand of employing and integrating devices with actuation capabilities, such as smart bulbs, HVAC,smart locks, industrial machines, robots or drones. Many middleware platforms have been developed in orderto support the development of distributed IoT applications and facilitate the sensors-to-cloud communication andedge processing capabilities, but surprisingly very little has been done to provide middleware-level, support andgeneric mechanisms for discovering the devices and their interfaces, and executing the actuation commands, i.e.transferring them to the device. In this paper, we present a generic support for actuation as an extension ofContextNet, our mobile-cloud middleware for IoMT. We describe the design of the distributed actuation supportand present a proof of working implementation that enables remote control of a Sphero mobile BB-8 toy