Operating system support for mobile robot swarms

摘要

In this paper, we present an operating system for mobile robot swarms. Three main issues are addressed here: First, the programming abstraction is introduced that states the model based on which swarm applications are developed. They consist of spatial-temporal actions that are executed concurrently and distributed. This is completely transparent for the application developer. An action is an interaction with the physical world and requests swarm resources in order to perform the action. Next, the operating system is presented. It is responsible for the execution of swarm applications. The system follows a service-oriented architecture design which consists of global system services and local node services. While the former perform system management and resource allocation, the latter perform the application execution and node movement. Last, in order to assign spatial-temporal actions to nodes a central element of the operating system is the space-time scheduler. It schedules the actions from all applications in space and time and computes spatial-temporal trajectories for the node movement.