Pervasive Pheromone-Based Interaction with RFID Tags

Despite the growing interest in pheromone-based interaction to enforce adaptive and context-awarecoordination, the number of deployed systems exploiting digital pheromones to actually coordinate the activitiesof situated autonomous agents is still very limited. In this paper, we present a simple, low-cost and generalpurposeimplementation of a pheromone-based interaction mechanism for pervasive environments. This isrealized by making use of RFID tags to store digital pheromones, and by having humans or robots spread/sensepheromones by properly writing/reading RFID tags populating the surrounding physical environment. Weexemplify and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach via an application for object-tracking. This applicationallows robots and humans to find "forgotten-somewhere" objects by following pheromones trails associatedwith them. In addition, we sketch further potential applications of our approach in pervasive computingscenarios, discuss related work in the area, and identify future research directions.