Montreal Space Symposium

We are currently on the verge of a new technology revolution---autonomous systems are becoming more and more present in our everyday lives. From drones to self-driving cars, these systems are becoming pervasive, and are acting as an enabling technology for many kinds of safety-critical applications, also in space. Examples of applications are search-and-rescue operations, industrial and agricultural inspection, autonomous car driving, planetary exploration, and satellite mega-constellations. Despite this ambitious vision, the major achievements in the area of swarm systems still consist of algorithms that tackle specific problem instances, and the performance of these algorithms strongly depends upon the context in which they are developed. Given this state of affairs, reproducing results and comparing algorithms is difficult, hindering the development of swarm robotics as a whole. We present a novel paradigm for the development of complex swarm behaviors. It offers a small, but powerful set of operations to specify behaviors both in a swarm-wide fashion, and from the point of view of an individual device. This swarm-oriented programming offers the promise of letting a designer program thousands of autonomous systems (e.g. robots, satellites) in a manageable way. This talk will present the overall swarm-oriented approach, as well as practical examples in the area of planetary exploration.