Abstract: There is a general trend in designing distributed control systems to give an increasing amount of autonomy to the individual nodes of such systems. Autonomous nodes interact only loosely. But also, close cooperation under hard real-time constraints is required in certain situations. This paper analyzes approaches for structuring distributed control systems and presents an architecture integrating object-oriented frameworks, publisher/ subscriber communication, and hard- and soft-real-time communication. For supporting mobile robots, wireless communication is considered in particular.