A Common Framework for Co-operative Robotics: An Open, Fault Tolerant Architecture for Multi-league RoboCup Teams

Research in the RoboCup domain has grown considerably since the beginning of this initiative more than ten years ago. Much of this growth is due to the existence of different leagues, that allow the focussing of research in specific and heterogeneous issues. This specialisation of research has, though, proven to have some drawbacks: research subjects become very specific, and one loses the ability of properly generalising, and sharing, the obtained results. This paper presents an architecture that aims at being open, enabling the development of independent components that can easily be ported between application environments. This architecture, called Common Framework, relies on standardised interfaces, protocols and communication channels between components. Besides allowing the free association of heterogeneous components, like real and simulated back-ends, it also considerably eases the introduction of principles of redundancy and fault tolerance.