An adaptive middleware core for a multi-agent coordination language

Abstract

Achieving cooperative behavior in multi-robot systems in dynamic environments with unreliable communication is an active research area. Therefore, several middlewares and protocols have been proposed including different consensus mechanisms. However, these solutions either are tailored for very specific problems and thus lack flexibility or are based on general middleware frameworks that are too heavy-weight and inefficient. Hence, as main contribution we present a comprehensive multirobot coordination approach, which can adapt its communication middleware core to explicitly address unreliable and range-limited communication for the needs of multi-robot systems. To achieve this, we use a lightweight and fully distributed object space that supports different consistency levels as adaptive middleware core embedded in a multi-robot coordination language.