Here - Agents Lab - University of Nottingham

Fig. 5. PEIS Connectivity Graph Visualization Tool6 Conclusions and future workThis paper has examined pre-existing middleware employed for the control ofrobotic ecologies and illustrated their use in conjuction with the Self -OSGi agentframework. The resulting framework provides re-usable, lightweight, modularend extensible mechanisms for the specification and the development of decentralizedcoordination mechanisms for robotic ecologies.While the adoption of a multi-agent approach is often adopted for robot systemdesign, a key and original result of our approach is that both system’s distributionand adaptation become hortogonal concerns freeing the developers totackle application requirements. Once application components are implementedand their semantic and inter-dependencies described with Self -OSGi XML files,they can be freely distributed over the network, as the distributed Self -OSGidescribed in this paper will automatically manage their instantiation and configurationto achieve application’s objectives.Future work will test the framework with larger scale problems and also seekto adapt agent/planning integration and agent learning techniques to tackle someof the main limitations of our architecture, such as its lack of look-ahead and itsreliance on hard-coded pre-conditions of component plans.83