Abstract
Programming swarm robots is considered to be more challenging than developing single robot applications, mostly due to the unpredictable behaviors and complex coordination of the swarm. In this paper, we present GSDF, a generic development framework for swarm robotics, to promote both programmability and flexibility. In its core lies a lightweight runtime, which maintains all the swarm-related data structures in a decentralized manner. The runtime is based on the design of a two-level communication graph, which decouples intra- and inter-robot communications. On the intra-robot level, existing popular messaging mechanisms, such as that of the Robot Operating System (ROS), can be adopted to reuse programming resources in the ROS eco-system. On the inter-robot level, the framework presents an abstract communication layer. It provides a unified communication interface to the framework runtime, and hence makes the framework agnostic to underlying communication mechanisms. GSDF also provides a clear interface to facilitate programming robot swarms, including prescribed tools for swarm management and information sharing. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of GSDF using a couple of experiments in robotic simulators.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by National Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 91648204 and No. 61601486, and Research on Foundations of Major Applications, Research Programs of NUDT under Grant No. ZDYYJCYJ20140601.
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Chang, X., Cai, Z., Wang, Y., Yi, X., Xiao, N. (2017). GSDF: A Generic Development Framework for Swarm Robotics. In: Huang, Y., Wu, H., Liu, H., Yin, Z. (eds) Intelligent Robotics and Applications. ICIRA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10462. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65289-4_62
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