MDLn: A Motion Description Language for Networked Systems

(c) 2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Digital Object Identifier : 10.1109/CDC.2008.4739185In this paper we extend the definition of a Motion Description Language (MDL) to networked systems. This new construction (MDLn) supports inter-agent specification rules as well as desired network topologies, enabling us to specify high-level control programs for group interactions. In particular, MDLn-strings specify multi-modal executions of the system through a concatenation of modes. Each mode in the MDLn-string is a triple, specifying a control law, interrupt conditions, and desired network dependencies. In addition to proposing MDLn as a specification language for networked systems, we also give an architecture in which MDLn strings can be effectively parsed and executed in multi-robot applications