Part of the book series:Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 6))
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Abstract
Controllers for autonomous robotic systems can be specified using state machines . However, these are typically developed in anad hoc manner without formal semantics, which makes it difficult to analyse the controller. Simulations are often used during the development, but a rigorous connection between the designed controller and the implementation is often overlooked. This paper presents a state-machine based notation, RoboChart, together with a tool to automatically create code from the state machines, establishing a rigorous connection between specification and implementation. In RoboChart, a robot’s controller is specified either graphically or using a textual description language. The controller code for simulation is automatically generated through a direct mapping from the specification. We demonstrate our approach using two case studies (self-organized aggregation and swarm taxis) in swarm robotics. The simulations are presented using two different simulators showing the general applicability of our approach.
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Notes
- 1.
The specification of environment is still under development. Currently the environmental stimuli are manually defined in the simulation.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the support from EPSRC grant EP/M025756/1.
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Authors and Affiliations
Department of Electronics, University of York, York, UK
Wei Li & Jon Timmis
Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK
Alvaro Miyazawa, Pedro Ribeiro, Ana Cavalcanti & Jim Woodcock
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Editors and Affiliations
Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Roderich Groß
Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Andreas Kolling
School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy (SEMTE), Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
Spring Berman
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Emilio Frazzoli
ENAC, IIE, DIAL, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
Alcherio Martinoli
Department of Mechanical Engineering and Science, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
Fumitoshi Matsuno
Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired, Cambridge, MA, USA
Melvin Gauci
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Li, W., Miyazawa, A., Ribeiro, P., Cavalcanti, A., Woodcock, J., Timmis, J. (2018). From Formalised State Machines to Implementations of Robotic Controllers. In: Groß, R.,et al. Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73008-0_36
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