Abstract
Currently, the control software of swarm robotics systems is created by ad hoc development. This makes it hard to deploy these systems in real-world scenarios. In particular, it is difficult to maintain, analyse, or verify the systems. Formal methods can contribute to overcome these problems. However, they usually do not guarantee that the implementation matches the specification, because the system’s control code is typically generated manually. Also, there is cultural resistance to apply formal methods; they may be perceived as an additional step that does not add value to the final product. To address these problems, we propose supervisory control theory for the domain of swarm robotics. The advantages of supervisory control theory, and its associated tools, are a reduction in the amount of ad hoc development, the automatic generation of control code from modelled specifications, proofs of properties over generated control code, and the reusability of formally designed controllers between different robotic platforms. These advantages are demonstrated in four case studies using the e-puck and Kilobot robot platforms. Experiments with up to 600 physical robots are reported, which show that supervisory control theory can be used to formally develop state-of-the-art solutions to a range of problems in swarm robotics.
Highlights
Swarm robotics studies how large groups of robots can interact with each other in simple ways to solve relatively complex tasks cooperatively
A cultural resistance to apply formal methods can be observed: they may be perceived as an additional step that does not add value to the final product, prolongs its development cycle, and introduces undesired complexity, and their integration is often impeded by the lack of appropriate tools (Knight et al 1997)
In this paper1, we propose the application of supervisory control theory (SCT) to the domain of swarm robotics
Summary
Swarm robotics studies how large groups of robots can interact with each other in simple ways to solve relatively complex tasks cooperatively. A cultural resistance to apply formal methods can be observed: they may be perceived as an additional step that does not add value to the final product, prolongs its development cycle, and introduces undesired complexity, and their integration is often impeded by the lack of appropriate tools (Knight et al 1997) In this paper, we propose the application of supervisory control theory (SCT) to the domain of swarm robotics. By using SCT, we show how to formally model the capabilities of and specifications for swarm robotics systems and how to automatically generate the controllers (including source code) for the individual robots in the swarm.
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