Towards an integrated automatic design process for robot swarms.

The specification of missions to be accomplished by a robot swarm has been rarely discussed in the literature: designers do not follow any standardized processes or use any tool to precisely define a mission that must be accomplished. In this paper, we introduce a fully integrated design process that starts with the specification of a mission to be accomplished and terminates with the deployment of the robots in the target environment. We introduce Swarm Mission Language (SML), a textual language that allows swarm designers to specify missions.

Automatic modular design of robot swarms using behavior trees as a control architecture.

We investigate the possibilities, challenges, and limitations that arise from the use of behavior trees in the context of the automatic modular design of collective behaviors in swarm robotics. To do so, we introduce Maple, an automatic design method that combines predefined modules-low-level behaviors and conditions-into a behavior tree that encodes the individual behavior of each robot of the swarm. We present three empirical studies based on two missions: aggregation and Foraging.

Functional Self-Awareness and Metacontrol for Underwater Robot Autonomy.

Autonomous systems are expected to maintain a dependable operation without human intervention. They are intended to fulfill the mission for which they were deployed, that may affect them. Underwater robots, such as the UX-1 mine explorer developed in the UNEXMIN project, are paradigmatic examples of this need.

Automatic Off-Line Design of Robot Swarms: A Manifesto.

Designing collective behaviors for robot swarms is a difficult endeavor due to their fully distributed, highly redundant, and ever-changing nature. To overcome the challenge, a few approaches have been proposed, which can be classified as manual, semi-automatic, or automatic design. This paper is intended to be the manifesto of the automatic off-line design for robot swarms.