ETHNOS-II: A programming environment for distributed multiple robotic systems

Most robot software architectures focus on the problem of imitating human intelligence and thus typically refer to a single robot perceiving, navigating and acting in the environment. However, the rapid progress of communication technology has modified this reference scenario, offering, the possibility of "distributing" the intelligent activity on a network of robots, computers and other general sensing and actuating devices. This allows the robot to merge with the environment it operates in and, moreover, different robots may co-operate as a single entity in order to carry out a specific task more efficiently. This paper tackles this "extended" problem, presenting ETHNOS-II, a programming environment for the design of a system composed of different robots integrated with the environment they operate in ETHNOS-II provides support from two main point of views: from the software engineering perspective it provides support for platform independence, software integration and re-use, computation distribution; from the runtime perspective it provides support for real-time execution and event handling, inter-robot communication, and intra-robot resource allocation.