Towards a Formal Specification for Self-organized Shape Formation in Swarm Robotics
This work addresses the need for formal modeling in swarm robotics for shape formation, which is incremental as it applies an existing formal method to a new application area.
The authors tackled the problem of modeling self-organized shape formation in swarm robotics by applying a formal specification approach using Z language, demonstrating its effectiveness for designing and implementing such systems.
The self-organization of robots for the formation of structures and shapes is a stimulating application of the swarm robotic system. It involves a large number of autonomous robots of heterogeneous behavior, coordination among them, and their interaction with the dynamic environment. This process of complex structure formation is considered a complex system, which needs to be modeled by using any modeling approach. Although the formal specification approach along with other formal methods has been used to model the behavior of robots in a swarm. However, to the best of our knowledge, the formal specification approach has not been used to model the self-organization process in swarm robotic systems for shape formation. In this paper, we use a formal specification approach to model the shape formation task of swarm robots. We use Z (Zed) language of formal specification, which is a state-based language, to model the states of the entities of the systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Z for the self-organized shape formation. The presented formal specification model gives the outlines for designing and implementing the swarm robotic system for the formation of complex shapes and structures. It also provides the foundation for modeling the complex shape formation process for swarm robotics using a multi-agent system in a simulation-based environment. Keywords: Swarm robotics, Self-organization, Formal specification, Complex systems