An Architecture for Real-Time Control in Multi-robot Systems

This paper presents a novel robotic architecture that is suitable for modular distributed multi-robot systems. The architecture is based on an interface supporting real-time inter-process communication, which allows simple and highly efficient data exchange between the modules. It allows monitoring of the internal system state and easy logging, thus facilitating the module development. The extension to distributed systems is provided through a communication middleware, which enables fast and transparent exchange of data through the network, although without real-time guarantees. The advantages and disadvantages of the architecture are rated using an existing framework for evaluation of robot architectures.