Building Blocks of SIC

This section will guide you through the building blocks of the Social Interaction Cloud framework.

Components: Sensors, Actuators, and Services

You can picture creating a SIC application as a process of connecting components together, or building with Legos. Components are either Sensors, Actuators, or Services.

Component Breakdown — Sensors are the input devices that collect data from the physical environment.

Component Breakdown — Services are components that transform data from one format to another in a desirable way.

Component Breakdown — Actuators are the output devices that operate on the physical environment.

Component Breakdown — Breakdown of Component types in SIC.

Pictured below are some example setups of SIC Components:

Face Detection Component Diagram — Component diagram for a Dialogflow application using a Nao robot.

Multi-Actuator Component Diagram — Component diagram for a Face Detection application using a Nao robot. It is possible to use the output of a Component as input to multiple other Components.

Sentiment Analysis Component Diagram — Component diagram for a Sentiment Analysis application. Note that some Services may require multiple input types.

Supporting Elements: ComponentManager, Connector, and Redis

In reality, SIC is a lot more than just Components. There are other elements that are used to support Components, namely:

ComponentManager — ComponentManagers are responsible for starting and stopping Components on hosts/devices.

Connector — Connectors behave as remote controls and are the actual interface the user uses to interact with the Components.

Device — Devices are the physical devices where the Components run.

Redis — Redis is the message broker that is used to communicate between the Components.

Application — The SIC Application is the script the user writes that connects the Components together.

Example Application Diagrams

Redis — High-level diagram for a simple Dialogflow application.