Robust by composition: Programs for multi-robot systems

Abstract

This paper describes how to specify the local reactive behavior of robots via guarded command programs with rates. These programs express concurrency and can be composed easily. Rates allow programs to be interpreted as Markov processes, which we use to define an appropriate notion of robustness and performance. We use composition to “robustify” programs with good performance, i.e. create a robust program with good performance from a program that has good performance but is not robust. We demonstrate this approach on a sub process of a reconfiguration program in a multi-robot system.