Experiences with building sentient materials using various sensors

In the future, every material will contain a computer and become smart. We call these materials sentient materials. Sentient materials can detect their state, and enable an application to change their behaviors according to its surrounding environments in a context-aware way. However, there are many difficulties about building a sentient material, which is especially inherent in using various sensors. This paper describes some issues for building sentient materials from experiences with building simple prototype implementations, and discusses how to solve the problems by using a concept of the world model.