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Composable continuous-space programs for robotic swarms

  • Swarm Robotics
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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.

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Notes

  1. SwarmBots [29] are not to be confused with Swarm-bots [31], a similarly named robotic platform.

  2. http://www.ode.org.

  3. http://www.openwrt.org.

  4. See [8] for more on the subtleties of random values on an amorphous medium.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially funded by the National Science Foundation via NSF grant CCF-0621897.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Other Lab, 2300 3rd Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107, USA

    Jonathan Bachrach

  2. BBN Technologies, 10 Moulton Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Jacob Beal

  3. Rice University, 6100 Main, Houston, TX, 77005, USA

    James McLurkin

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  1. Jonathan Bachrach
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Correspondence to Jacob Beal.

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Bachrach, J., Beal, J. & McLurkin, J. Composable continuous-space programs for robotic swarms. Neural Comput & Applic 19, 825–847 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-010-0382-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-010-0382-8

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