Data and Event Handling for the MARIE Vehicle

In autonomous control systems the sensor-actuator control loop plays a dominant role. It is essential to give the system the capability to react to changes in its environment. A flexible autonomous system needs to reconfigure its sensor-actuator control loops depending on its surroundings, the task at hand, and the available sources of information. In the system architecture of the MARIE vehicle there is a clear difference between control and data flow. In this article we describe our general approach to realise the data interfaces between the several sensingand actuation-modules. Information users can dynamically select their sources and monitoring is transparently supported. Also we describe how the modules can be controlled (initialised, parameterised, activated, suspended) from a higher abstraction layer through the so called elementary operation interface.