Exploiting Aggregate Programming in a Multi-Robot Service Prototype
This work addresses coordination complexities in multi-robot systems for applications like healthcare and rescue, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new domain.
The authors tackled the challenge of building multi-robot systems by adopting Aggregate Programming for coordination software, resulting in a prototype validated through simulations and tests in a university library.
Multi-robot systems are becoming increasingly relevant within diverse application domains, such as healthcare, exploration, and rescue missions. However, building such systems is still a significant challenge, since it adds the complexities of the physical nature of robots and their environments to those inherent in coordinating any distributed (multi-agent) system. Aggregate Programming (AP) has recently emerged as a promising approach to engineering resilient, distributed systems with proximity-based communication, and is notably supported by practical frameworks. In this paper we present a prototype of a multi-robot service system, which adopts AP for the design and implementation of its coordination software. The prototype has been validated both with simulations, and with tests in a University library.