On the Need of Systemic Support for Spatio-Temporal Programming of Mobile Robot Swarms

Abstract

In this paper, we present SwarmOS -- a distributed operating system for mobile robot swarms. SwarmOS features transaction-based spatio-temporal programming of mobile robot swarms on a systemic level. We show the programming model and resource management in SwarmOS. Swarm applications consist of concurrent, distributed and context-aware actions. We provide distributed transactions in order to guarantee atomic execution of a set of dependent actions. We distinguish between schedulability and executability of a set of actions: the first one is checked by the space-time scheduler which is a core service of the execution environment. The scheduler plans actions in space and time and computes spatio-temporal trajectories if robot movement is necessary. In order to guarantee executability of a distributed transaction of spatio-temporal actions, we present the concept of path alternatives and a time-based two-phase commit protocol in order to assure consistency. We show the feasibility of our approach by performing experiments on our testbed.