The Distributed Control Framework: A software infrastructure for agent-based distributed control and robotics

We address the shortage of available software frameworks for distributed control systems/robotics and describe a novel agent-based software architecture simplifying the development, testing, and deployment of distributed controllers. Our distributed control framework (DCF) provides extensive support for robot team coordination and management, a pluggable architecture for sensing and estimation, robust simulation capabilities with support for hardware in the loop, and a high- level platform-independent programming language for hybrid control called MDLe (motion description language extended). We highlight two experiments that showcase the DCF and MDLe using real robots, and we conclude the paper with the derivation and discussion of an indoor robot navigation system used in our experiments. The navigation system combines robot odometry and range measurements from a network of Cricket^reg sensors using an extended Kalman filter.