The Distributed Control Framework (DCF) is a modular and extensible software architecture for distributed robotics applications built on top of the CybelePro agent framework. The DCF leverages the Activity Centric Programming (ACP) model provided by CybelePro and provides capabilities for robot team coordination and management, a pluggable architecture for sensing and estimation, support for heterogeneous robot platforms, robust simulation with hardware in the loop integration, and use MDLe - a high-level platform-independent programming language for hybrid control. Core functionalities such as peer-to-peer communications, exchange of messages through a publisher-subscriber model, and concurrency are provided to the DCF by CybelePro. With the DCF, users can simulate multi-agent systems comprised of thousands of interacting agents with real hardware in the loop. Such capabilities enable researchers to gain new insights into emergent behavior of teams and identify possible failure modes prior to full-scale deployment on real hardware.

DCF is available for free and packaged with MDLe and CybeleLite for deployment on single robot. For deployment on multiple robots, download CybelePro.

DCF customers may download DCF Controllers and Sensor Drivers offered by IAI to create a heterogeneous real-time or simulation environment. Following DCF Controlleres are offered by IAI:

• DCF-ARIA for Robot Platforms developed by Mobile Robots conforming to ARIA API
• DCF-Create for iRobot Create platform
• DCF-LAGR for LAGR robot platform developed by CMU

IAI also offers following DCF Sensor Drivers which can be used in platform independent way:

• DCF-Cameras: DCF Drivers for platform independent use of USB and Firewire Cameras
• DCF-IMU: DCF Drivers for AHRS, Gyroscope, and Accelerometer sensors
• DCF-Cricket: DCF Drivers for Cricket range sensors
• DCF-GPS: DCF Drivers for GPS sensors (e.g., Ublox's ANTARIS)