Dolphin: a task orchestration language for autonomous vehicle networks
This work addresses the challenge of coordinating complex tasks in autonomous vehicle networks, though it appears incremental as it builds upon existing concepts with a new language implementation.
The authors tackled the problem of orchestrating tasks for autonomous vehicle networks by introducing Dolphin, an extensible programming language that enables compositional task execution across multiple vehicles, with field tests demonstrating its application using unmanned underwater and aerial vehicles.
We present Dolphin, an extensible programming language for autonomous vehicle networks. A Dolphin program expresses an orchestrated execution of tasks defined compositionally for multiple vehicles. Building upon the base case of elementary one-vehicle tasks, the built-in operators include support for composing tasks in several forms, for instance according to concurrent, sequential, or event-based task flow. The language is implemented as a Groovy DSL, facilitating extension and integration with external software packages, in particular robotic toolkits. The paper describes the Dolphin language, its integration with an open-source toolchain for autonomous vehicles, and results from field tests using unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).