21st July 2014. My presentation at MORSE 2014 (http://st.inf.tu-dresden.de/MORSE14) about a family of Domain-Specific Languages for specifying Civilian Missions of Multi-Robot Systems.
3. Civilian missions today
• High costs
– team training and transportation
– operating costs
• Safety
– significant risks (e.g., fire, earthquake, etc.)
• Timing and endurance
– exhausting shifts
– activities stopped at night
4. Using robots for civilian missions [1]
Many civilian missions can be executed either by flying, ground or water robots
5. Multi-robots missions
Civilian missions can be executed by multiple robots
à lower mission completion time
à fault-tolerance w.r.t. mission goal fulfillment
à enables the use of highly-specialized robots
All the robots perform their actions to fulfil the common goal of
the mission
however...
common goal
6. Challenges
• On-site operators must be expert of all the types of used robots
– in terms of dynamics, hardware capabilities, etc.
• On-site operators have to simultaneously control a large number
of robots during the mission execution
• Robots provide very low-level APIs and very basic primitives
– error-prone development
– task-specific robots
– no reuse
These issues ask for
• abstraction
• automation
7. MDE for multi-robot missions
MDE allows all stakeholders to focus on models of the mission with
concepts that are:
• closer to the application domain
• independent from the specific robot technologies
• enabling automation à autonomous robots
http://mdse-book.com
9. The family of languages
Mission
Context
Map
MML
BL
Behavior
BL models synthesis
Robots
configuration
Mission
Execution Engine
RL
10. Principles
Mask complexity
à usable by non-technical experts
à domain-specific concepts
Independence w.r.t. the types of robots
Reuse of models
Robots must be autonomous
15. Involved stakeholders
Operator
in-the-field stakeholder specifying the mission
Robot engineer
– models a specific kind of robot
– develops the controller that instructs the robot on how to perform
BL basic operations
Platform extender
– extends the MML metamodel with new kinds of tasks
– develops a synthesizer for transforming each new task to its
corresponding BL operations
MML
RL + controller
MML + synthesizer
16. Extension for autonomous quadrotors
Special kind of helicopter with:
• high stability
• omni-directional
• smaller fixed-pitch rotors
à safer than classical helicopters
• simple to design and construct
• relatively inexpensive
image from http://goo.gl/FJFS5l
Issues
• require a trained pilot to operate them
• restricted to line-of-sight range
23. Future work
Extend the languages with timing constraints
Design a generic software architecture for
– mission editors, model transformations
– run-time engine for executing the mission
Safety and security as first-class elements both at mission
design-time and run-time
A more systematic language extension mechanism (like in [3])
Exercise the family of languages with other kinds of robot
(e.g., underwater missions)
24. References
[1] Skrzypietz, T.: Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Civilian Missions. BIGS policy paper.
Brandenburgisches Institut fur Gesellschaft und Sicherheit. BIGS (2012)
[2] Di Ruscio, D., Malavolta, I., Pelliccione, P.: Engineering a platform for mission planning of
autonomous and resilient quadrotors. In: Fifth International Workshop, on Software
Engineering for Resilient Systems , Springer Berlin Heidelberg (2013) 33–47
[3] Di Ruscio, D., Malavolta, I., Muccini, H., Pelliccione, P., Pierantonio, A.: Developing Next
Generation ADLs Through MDE Techniques. In: Procs. ICSE’10, ACM (2010) 85–94
25. + 39 380 70 21 600
Ivano Malavolta |
Gran Sasso Science Institute
iivanoo
ivano.malavolta@gssi.infn.it
www.di.univaq.it/malavolta
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