Jun 23, 2016 @ 16:58 |
microsswarmframework – a ROS based programming framework for swarm robotics using Buzz programming language
May be you have seen ants working together in a large scale to achieve a common goal. It looks very interesting but more than that it is very challenging job. By seeing them first question comes in our mind that How they are communicating and coordinating to each other to accomplish the target? And how they are dividing workload with each ant?
The same question arises in researchers minds when they think about robot swarms. Among the many hurdles towards real world deployment of these systems, one of the most important is the lack of dedicated tools, especially regarding programmability. The current practice of swarm behavior development typically focuses on individual behaviors and low-level interactions. And Current approach forces developers to constantly ‘reinvent the wheel’ to fit well-known algorithms into new applications, resulting in a slow and error prone development process. To solve this problem researchers thought that to communicate, coordinate and program at large scale robot swarms a specific language is required.
Researchers from Ecole Polytechnique de Montr´eal, Canada and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia presented a novel programming language, ‘Buzz’ for robot swarms. They presented the design principle, Buzz syntax and illustrated the capability of Buzz in terms of its conciseness and generality. They also analyzed the scalability and robustness of the Buzz run-time.
Now micROS Team announced microsswarmframework – a ROS-based programming framework for swarm robotics, developed by Xuefeng Chang. It is motivated by the rapidly increasing volume of research effort devoted into multi-robot systems and swarm robotics, and the design choice of API is largely enlightened by the Buzz programming language. Its goal is to facilitate ROS users in developing applications of robot swarms, by providing essential mechanisms, such as abstraction of swarms, swarm management, various communication tools, and a runtime environment, within the standard ROS ecosystem.
Currently, it is completely compatible with ROS indigo and presented in the form of a C++ library. Many additional features will be added in the future to make the framework more user-friendly and powerful.
Source code for the framework and demos in the Stage simulator can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/xuefengchang/micros_swarm_framework.
Related articles:
- Buzz: A New Programming Language for Robot Swarms
- Evolutionary Swarm Robotics: Evolving Self-Organising Behaviours in Groups of Autonomous Robots
- Artificial Evolution allows Better Self-Organized Task in Robot Swarm
- Controlling Swarms of Robots with a Finger