skip to main content
10.1145/1988008.1988012acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Runtime models for automatic reorganization of multi-robot systems

Published: 23 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a reusable framework for developing adaptive multi-robotic systems for heterogeneous robot teams using an organization-based approach. The framework is based on the Organizational Model for Adaptive Computational Systems (OMACS) and the Goal Model for Dynamic Systems (GMoDS). GMoDS is used to capture system-level goals that drive the system. OMACS is an abstract model used to capture the system configuration and allows the team to organize and reorganize without the need for explicit runtime reorganization rules. While OMACS provides an implicit reorganization capability, it also supports policies that can either guide or restrict the resulting organizations thus limiting unexpected or harmful adaptation. We demonstrate our framework by presenting the design and implementation of a multi-robot system for detecting improvised explosive devices. We then highlight the adaptability of the resulting system.

References

[1]
Bencomo, N., Whittle, J., Sawyer, P., Finkelstein, A. and Letier, E. 2010. Requirements reflection: requirements as runtime entities. Proc. of the 32nd ACM/IEEE Intl. Conf on Software Engineering - Vol 2 (ICSE '10), ACM, 199--202.
[2]
Blair, G. Bencomo, N. and France, R. B. 2009. [email protected], Computer, (Oct. 2009), 22--27.
[3]
Botelho, S. C., Alami, R.: M+: a scheme for multi-robot cooperation through negotiated task allocation and achievement. 1999. Proceedings of IEEE Int Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 1234--1238.
[4]
Cheng, B. H. C., Sawyer, P., Bencomo, N., and Whittle, J. 2009. A Goal-Based Modeling Approach to Develop Requirements of an Adaptive System with Environmental Uncertainty. Proc. of the 12th Intl. Conf. on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, Springer, 468--483.
[5]
DeLoach, S. A. 2009. Organizational model for adaptive complex systems. in Dignum, V. (ed.) Multi-agent systems: semantics and dynamics of organizational models. IGI Global.
[6]
DeLoach, S. A. and Garcia-Ojeda, J. C. 2010. O-MaSE: a customizable approach to designing and building complex, adaptive multiagent systems. Int J. of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. 4, 3, 244--280.
[7]
DeLoach, S. A. and Miller, M. 2010. A goal model for adaptive complex systems. Int J. of Computational Intelligence: Theory and Practice. 5, 2.
[8]
DeLoach, S. A., Oyenan, W. and Matson, E. T. 2008. A capabilities-based model for adaptive organizations. J. of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 16, 1, 13--56.
[9]
Dignum, V. 2004. A model for organizational interaction: based on agents, founded in logic. PhD thesis, Utrecht Univ.
[10]
Dignum, V., Vázquez-Salceda, J., Dignum, F. 2004. Omni: introducing social structure, norms and ontologies into agent organizations. Programming Multi-Agent Systems: Second Intl. Workshop (ProMAS 2004), LNCS 3346, 181--198, Springer: Berlin, 2004.
[11]
Fua C. H., and Ge, S. S. 2005. COBOS: cooperative backoff adaptive scheme for multirobot task allocation. IEEE Trans. on Robotics, 21, 6, 1168--1178.
[12]
Georgas, J. C., van der Hoek, A., and Taylor, R. N. 2009. Using architectural models to manage and visualize runtime adaptation, Computer, 42, 10 (Oct. 2009), 52--60.
[13]
Gerkey, B. P, and Matarić, M. J. 2002. Sold! : auction methods for multirobot coordination. IEEE Trans. on Robotics and Automation, 18, 5, 758--768.
[14]
Gerkey, B. P, and Matarić, M. J. A formal analysis and taxonomy of task allocation in multi-robot systems. The Intl. J. of Robotics Research, 23, 9, 939--954.
[15]
iRobot PackBot, http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=171.
[16]
Jureta, I. J., Borgida, A., Ernst, N. A., Mylopoulos, J. 2010. Techne: towards a new generation of requirements modeling languages with goals, preferences, and inconsistency handling. Proc of 18th Intl Req. Eng Conf. 115--124, IEEE.
[17]
Kube, C. R., and Zhang, H. 1993. Collective robotics: from social insects to robots. Adaptive Behavior, 2, 2, 189--218.
[18]
Liu, J. W. S. 2000. Real-Time Systems. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
[19]
Luck, M., McBurney, P., Shehory, O. and Willmott, S. 2005. Agent technology: computing as interaction (a roadmap for agent based computing). AgentLink: Southampton, UK.
[20]
M2 Technologies. 2007. M2 and MC IED Awareness: Controlling Robots Teams in Urban Environments. Presentation.
[21]
Matson, E., and DeLoach, S. A. 2004. Enabling intra-robotic capabilities adaptation using an organization-based multiagent system. Proceedings of the IEEE Intl Conf on Robotics and Automation. 3, 2135--2140.
[22]
Oyenan, W. H., DeLoach, S. A. and Singh, G. 2010. An organizational design for adaptive sensor networks. Proceedings of the 2010 IEE/WIC/ACM Intl Conf on Intelligent Agent Technology, 2, 239--242.
[23]
Parker, L. E. 1998. ALLIANCE: an architecture for fault tolerant multirobot cooperation. IEEE Trans. on Robotics and Automation, 14, 2, 220--240.
[24]
Parker, L. E. 2008. Distributed intelligence: overview of the field and its application in multi-robot systems. J. of Physical Agents, 2, 1, 5--14.
[25]
Passino, K. M. 2002. Biomimicry of bacterial foraging for distributed optimization and control. IEEE Control Systems Magazine, 22, 3, 52--67.
[26]
Sawyer, P., Bencomo, N., Whittle, J., Letier, E, Finkelstein, A. 2010. Requirements-Aware Systems: A Research Agenda for RE for Self-adaptive Systems. Proc of 18th IEEE Intl Requirements Engineering Conf. 95--103, IEEE.
[27]
Simmons, R., Singh, S., Hershberger, D., Ramos, J. and Smith, T. 2001. First results in the coordination of heterogeneous robots for large-scale assembly. In Experimental Robotics VII, Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences 271, 323--332. Springer, Berlin.
[28]
Stone P., and Veloso, M. 1999. Task decomposition, dynamic role assignment, and low-bandwidth communication for real-time strategic teamwork. Artificial Intelligence, 110, 2, 241--273.
[29]
Tang, F., and Parker, L. E. 2005. "ASyMTRe: automated synthesis of multi-robot task solutions through software reconfiguration." In Proc. of the 2005 IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, IEEE, 1501--1508.
[30]
Tang, F., and Parker, L. E. 2005. Distributed multi-robot coalitions through ASyMTRe-d. Proceedings of the Intl. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IEEE, 2606--2613.
[31]
van Lamsweerde, A., Letier, E., and Darimont, R. 1998. Managing conflicts in goal-driven requirements engineering. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, 24, 11, 908--926.
[32]
Vazquez-Salceda, J., and Dignum, F. 2003. Modelling electronic organizations. in Multi-agent Systems and Applications III, LNAI 2691, 584--593, Springer: Berlin.
[33]
Whittle, J., Sawyer, P., Bencomo, N., Cheng, B. H. C., Bruel, J.-M. 2009. RELAX: Incorporating Uncertainty into the Specification of Self-Adaptive Systems. Proc of 17th Intl Req. Eng Conf. 79--88, IEEE.
[34]
Yu, E. S. K. 1997. Towards modelling and reasoning support for early-phase requirements engineering. Proc. of the Third Intl. Symp on Req Eng. 226--235. IEEE.

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Active Exploitation of Redundancies in Reconfigurable Multirobot SystemsIEEE Transactions on Robotics10.1109/TRO.2021.311828438:1(180-196)Online publication date: Feb-2022
  • (2021)A GRL-compliant iStar extension for collaborative cyber-physical systemsRequirements Engineering10.1007/s00766-021-00347-3Online publication date: 4-Feb-2021
  • (2020)Connecting conceptual models using relational reference attribute grammarsProceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems: Companion Proceedings10.1145/3417990.3421437(1-11)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2020
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SEAMS '11: Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems
May 2011
246 pages
ISBN:9781450305754
DOI:10.1145/1988008
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 May 2011

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. agent-oriented software engineering
  2. cooperative robotics
  3. runtime models
  4. self-adaptive systems

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

ICSE11
Sponsor:
ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering
May 23 - 24, 2011
HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 31 submissions, 55%

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)3
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 20 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Active Exploitation of Redundancies in Reconfigurable Multirobot SystemsIEEE Transactions on Robotics10.1109/TRO.2021.311828438:1(180-196)Online publication date: Feb-2022
  • (2021)A GRL-compliant iStar extension for collaborative cyber-physical systemsRequirements Engineering10.1007/s00766-021-00347-3Online publication date: 4-Feb-2021
  • (2020)Connecting conceptual models using relational reference attribute grammarsProceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems: Companion Proceedings10.1145/3417990.3421437(1-11)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2020
  • (2019)Goal modeling for collaborative groups of cyber-physical systems with GRLProceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3297280.3297436(1600-1609)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2019
  • (2019)[email protected]Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-018-00712-x18:5(3049-3082)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2019
  • (2019)Diversity in Massively Multi-agent Systems: Concepts, Implementations, and Normal AccidentsMassively Multi-Agent Systems II10.1007/978-3-030-20937-7_8(111-129)Online publication date: 19-May-2019
  • (2018)Towards a New Approach for Controlling the Reorganization Process of Multi-Agent SystemsComputer Systems and Software Engineering10.4018/978-1-5225-3923-0.ch088(2068-2087)Online publication date: 2018
  • (2018)SO-MRS: A Multi-robot System Architecture Based on the SOA Paradigm and OntologyTowards Autonomous Robotic Systems10.1007/978-3-319-96728-8_28(330-342)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2018
  • (2017)A Framework for Developing and Using Shared Mental Models in Human-Agent TeamsJournal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making10.1177/155534341668289111:3(203-224)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2017
  • (2017)Decentralized Dynamic Adaptation for Service-Based Collective Adaptive SystemsService-Oriented Computing – ICSOC 2016 Workshops10.1007/978-3-319-68136-8_1(5-20)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2017
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media