[spartango]

If you have a look at the GRTFramework(code.google.com/p/grtframework), you'll notice that we use multithreading extensively, with sensor and actuator abstractions/drivers being independent threads, and controllers for specific robot mechanisms acting completely independently from each other. We have not noticed any real performance costs thus far, and thus strongly recommend a threaded model to segregated robot parts.

I'm not saying that threading has no performance costs, but for the purposes of this competition they are not noticeable even with java threads.