Integrated Research and Development Environment for Real-Time Distributed Embodied Intelligent Systems

In the field of intelligent systems, research and design approaches vary from predefined architectures to self-organizing systems. Regardless of the architectural approach, such systems may grow in size and complexity to levels where the capacities of people are strongly challenged. Such systems are commonly researched, designed and developed following several methods and with the help of a variety of software tools. In this paper we want to describe our research and development environment. It is composed of a set of tools that support our research and enable us to develop large scale intelligent systems used in our robots and in our test platforms. The main parts of our research and development environment are: the component models BBCM (brain bytes component model) and BBDM (brain bytes data model), the middleware RTBOS (real-time brain operating system), the monitoring system CMBOS (control-monitor brain operating system) and the design environment DTBOS (design tool for brain operating system). We will compare our research and development environment with others available on the market or still in research phase and we will describe some of our experiments