Evaluation of Multi-agent Coordination on Embedded Systems

Efforts have already been made to embed agents and agent-oriented technology into robots and other systems. For this purpose, many architectures and frameworks have been developed to allow software agents to interact properly with hardware components of theses systems. However, few proposals have evaluated a system where multiple agents are involved and require coordination. This paper compares the multi-agent systems approach, with a multi-agent-oriented programming language, against a more standard approach, with imperative programming, in the development of embedded systems that require coordination. To support the comparison, applications were implemented and evaluated with hardware-in-the-loop.