Coordinating distributed autonomous agents with a real-time database: the CAMBADA project

摘要

Interest on using mobile autonomous agents has been growing,recently, due to their capacity to cooperate for diverse purposes, from rescue todemining and security. However, such cooperation requires the exchange ofstate data that is time sensitive and thus, applications should be aware of datatemporal coherency. In this paper we describe the architecture of the agents thatconstitute the CAMBADA robotic soccer team developed at the University ofAveiro, Portugal. This architecture is built around a real-time database that ispartially replicated in all team members and contains both local and remote statevariables. The temporal coherency of the data is enforced by an adequatemanagement system that refreshes each database item transparently at a ratespecified by the application. The application software accesses the statevariables of all agents with local operations, only, delivering both value andtemporal coherency.