Concordia

Project direction

Concordia is being developed as a control platform for network-connected objects, robotics devices, and intelligent agents. The first stage is focused on narrowing the problem, defining the interfaces, and establishing a useful technical foundation.

Name origin and purpose

The name comes from the Latin word for "harmony", "union", or "agreement". The project's purpose is to provide a centralised command centre capable of controlling all manner of robotics projects, both destructive and non-destructive. Its base version is aimed squarely at real-time combat robotics, acting as a man-in-the-middle controller between operator and robot.

The reasoning for building this in-house rather than adopting an off-the-shelf solution is latency: most existing frameworks sit at a higher abstraction level, which adds functionality at the cost of a larger codebase that takes longer to execute. The key benefit of a man-in-the-middle setup is real-time telemetry from the robot alongside the ability to communicate over multiple channels simultaneously.

Language and GUI framework

Because of the low-latency requirement, the implementation language had to be compiled. C/C++ and Rust were the two candidates; C/C++ was chosen due to prior developer experience, though Rust — reputed to combine C++'s performance with Python-like safety and ease of use — remains a candidate for a future migration.

For the GUI layer, several C/C++ frameworks were considered (Qt, wxWidgets, Dear ImGui, FLTK). FLTK was selected for being lightweight and operating-system agnostic.

Current scope

The repository is at its initial stage. Further details will be added as the system architecture, target devices, and control model are defined.

The project is intentionally starting with the system boundary: what should be controlled, how it should communicate, and where intelligence belongs.