JaMOS - A MDL2/spl epsi/ based Operating System for Swarm Micro Robotics

Abstract

Micro robots in large scale swarms often have a very restricted program memory which limits the robot's application range. We present a finite state machine operating system for swarm micro robots, that can overcome such problems and gives the designer of swarm algorithms a tool that is easy to handle. The operating system's flow control or rather the robot's control program is represented in the Motion Description Language Two Extended (MDL2epsiv). MDL2epsiv is based on MDLepsiv but has been extended to a fully functional behaviour description language as shown in this paper. The MDL2epsiv based control programs are encoded in a byte code that is interpreted on a micro controller. The byte-code concept significantly reduces the size of the control program which will be shown in this paper.