The vision of an Ecology of Physically Embedded Intelligent Systems, or PEIS-Ecology, combines insights from the fields of autonomous robotics and ambient intelligence to provide a new approach to building robotic systems in the service of people. In this paper, we present this vision, and we report the results of a four-year collaborative research project between Sweden and Korea aimed at the concrete realization of this vision. We focus in particular on three results: a robotic middleware able to cope with highly heterogeneous systems; a technique for autonomous self-configuration and re-configuration; and a study of the problem of sharing information of both physical and digital nature.