Interacting with multi-robot systems using BML

Abstract

Using a multi-robot system in military operations poses many control problems. The ability to formulate clear and unambiguous commands for the robots thus is extremely desirable. As numerous autonomous functions have been developed both for single robots and for multi-robot systems, we want the operator to express just what needs to be done, whereas the robots have to figure out how to do it. Therefore, we use the Battle Management Language (BML) to command multi-robot systems. As BML has been developed by the military research community, it is – as required – designed to express short, unambiguous orders readable by both humans and machines. This article presents an overview over the BML commands that can be given to the robots as well as an overview over the BML reports generated by robots and presented to the operator.