Composable continuous-space programs for robotic swarms

Authors:
Jonathan Bachrach;Jacob Beal;James McLurkin
Affiliations:
Other Lab, 2300 3rd Street, 94107, San Francisco, CA, USA;BBN Technologies, 10 Moulton Street, 02138, Cambridge, MA, USA;Rice University, 6100 Main, 77005, Houston, TX, USA
Venue:
Neural Computing and Applications
Year:
2010

Citing 0
Cited 3

Core operational semantics of Proto

Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
An agent framework for agent societies

Proceedings of the compilation of the co-located workshops on DSM'11, TMC'11, AGERE!'11, AOOPES'11, NEAT'11, & VMIL'11
Property-driven design for swarm robotics

Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Programmability is an increasingly important barrier to the deployment of multi-robot systems, as no prior approach allows routine composition and reuse of general aggregate behaviors. The Proto spatial computing language, however, already provides this sort of aggregate behavior programming for non-mobile systems using an abstraction of the network as a continuous-space-filling device. We extend this abstraction to mobile systems and show that Proto can be applied to multi-robot systems with an actuator that turns a vector field into device motion. Proto programs operate on fields of values over an abstract device called the amorphous medium and can be joined together using functional composition. These programs are then automatically transformed for execution by individual devices, producing an approximation of the specified continuous-space behavior. We are thus able to build up a library of simple swarm behaviors, and to compose them together into highly succinct programs that predictably produce the desired complex swarm behaviors, as demonstrated in simulation and on a group of 40 iRobot SwarmBots.