Towards spatial macroprogramming for sensing and actuating robot swarms

Abstract

We present our ongoing work on the design of macroprogramming abstractions to program sensing and actuating applications using robot swarms. Robots can sample the environment and act on it where no other sensor can reach, e.g., to monitor the environment at altitude with aerial robots. Programming the individual behavior of multiple coordinating robots is difficult. We design LiftOff, a macroprogramming abstraction that allows to program robot swarms collectively, by creating the illusion of a single computing device that occupies the entire physical space of interest. We achieve this by giving variables and values in a programming language a spatial semantics. In LiftOff, values may be associated to a location, and programmers use the same variable to access different values at different locations, sparing the need to manually create a mapping from variables to spatial values. LiftOff applications execute synchronously or based on lazy evaluation. The former allows precise program analysis, e.g., using model checking, whilst the latter potentially executes faster. In this paper, we report on LiftOff's initial design and prototypes.