This paper discusses a multi-agent framework for the control of robot systems along with an integrated programming environment which takes advantage of it. An agent society is engaged in a competitive or cooperative interaction under a control metalevel while a particular agent represents the real-time robot machine. By virtue of the support of adequate tools, this schema well lends itself both to a general increase of robot programming capability and flexibility and to rapid protoyping of different architectural solutions. The overall programming environment is built upon the integration of a distributed, extended logic programming environment with a real-time RCCL-based robot server also interfaced to a graphical simulator, in which sensory driven tasks can be preliminary validated. An example of application of the environment to a simple test case concludes the paper.