Programming real time distributed multiple robotic systems

This paper presents ETHNOS-IV - a real-time programming environment for the design of a system composed of different robots, devices and external supervising or control stations. ETHNOS is being used for different service robotics applications and it is has also been used successfully used in RoboCup in the Italian ART robot team during the Stockholm 99 competition. It provides support from three main point of views which will be addressed in detail: inter-robot and intra-robot communication, real-time task scheduling, and software engineering, platform independence and code-reuse. Experimental results will also be presented.