Service Robots for Context Recognition in Smart Environments.

Background: A new concept for context recognition involves a smart home system, wearables, and service robots.

Objectives: To find the best suited robot platform for the given use case.

Methods: An assessment of available service robots based on various factors is carried out.

Absolute spectral backscatter measurements of large-core multimode PMMA polymer optical fibers.

To our knowledge, we are the first to measure the absolute value of the backscattering coefficient of a standard 1 mm core-diameter, multimode (MM) step-index (SI) polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) polymer optical fiber (POF) for the spectral range of 450 nm to 700 nm. Our optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) setup consists of a femtosecond supercontinuum laser with an acousto-optical filter as a tunable light source with short pulses and a time-correlated single-photon counting system as a receiver with a high dynamic range. The backscattering coefficient is calculated from the ratio between the energy within the fiber end reflex and the distributed backscattering level.