UBSwarm: Design of a Software Environment to Deploy Multiple Decentralized Robots

Abstract — this article presents a high-level configuration and task assignment software package that distributes algorithms on a swarm of robots which allows them to operate in a swarm fashion. When the swarm robotic system adopts a decentralized approach, the desired collective behaviors emerge from local decisions made by the robots themselves according to their environment. This paper first brings a discussion on the existing swarm control environments. Secondly it proposes a software application that aims to facilitate the deployment of multiple robotic agents which have different configurations and sensory components. Using its GUI, the proposed system expects the operator to select between several available robot agents and assign the group of robots a particular task from a set of available ones. The main purpose for designing this framework is to reduce the time and complexity of the development of robotic software and maintenance costs, and to improve code and component reusability