We present Buzz, a novel programming language for heterogeneous robot swarms. Buzz advocates a compositional approach, offering primitives to define swarm behaviors both from the perspective of the single robot and of the overall swarm. Single-robot primitives include robot-specific instructions and manipulation of neighborhood data. Swarm-based primitives allow for the dynamic management of robot teams, and for sharing information globally across the swarm. Self-organization stems from the completely decentralized mechanisms upon which the Buzz run-time platform is based. The language can be extended to add new primitives (thus supporting heterogeneous robot swarms), and its run-time platform is designed to be laid on top of other frameworks, such as Robot Operating System. We showcase the capabilities of Buzz by providing code examples, and analyze scalability and robustness of the run-time platform through realistic simulated experiments with representative swarm algorithms.
Meld @cite_10 is a declarative language that realizes the top-down approach by allowing the developer to specify a high-level, logic description of what the swarm as a whole should achieve. The low-level (communication coordination) mechanisms that reify the high-level goals, i.e., the how, are left to the language implementation and are transparent to the developer. The main concepts of the language are facts and rules. A fact encodes a piece of information that the system considers true at a given time. A computation in Meld consists of applying the specified rules progressively to produce all the true facts, until no further production is possible. Meld supports heterogeneous robot swarms by endowing each robot with facts that map to specific capabilities. A similar concept exists in Buzz, with robot-specific symbols (see sec:implcompilation ). The main limitation of Meld for swarm robotics is the fact that its rule-based mechanics produce programs whose execution is difficult to predict and debug, and it is thus impossible to decompose complex programs into well-defined modules.
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We address how to write programs for distributed computing systems in which the network topology can change dynamically. Examples of such systems, which we call ensembles , include programmable sensor networks (where the network topology can change due to failures in the nodes or links) and modular robotics systems (whose physical configuration can be rearranged under program control). We extend Meld [1], a logic programming language that allows an ensemble to be viewed as a single computing system. In addition to proving some key properties of the language, we have also implemented a complete compiler for Meld. It generates code for TinyOS [14] and for a Claytronics simulator [12]. We have successfully written correct, efficient, and complex programs for ensembles containing over one million nodes.