A Case Study on Agriture: Distributed HLA-Based Architecture for Agricultural Robotics

In agricultural robotics, as in other robotic systems, one of the most important parts is the control architecture. This paper describes the definition of a new control architecture specially designed for groups of robots in charge of doing maintenance tasks in agricultural environments. This architecture has been developed having in mind principles as scalability, code reuse, abstraction hardware and data distribution. Moreover, it is important that the control architecture can allow coordination and cooperation among the different elements in the system. The architecture presented in this paper implements all these concepts by means of the integration of different systems, such as Player, JADE and HLA. The most important system is HLA because it not only allows the data distribution and implicit communication among the parts of the system, but also allows to operate with simulated and real entities at the same time, allowing the use of hybrid systems in the development of applications.