Model Continuity to Support Software Development for Distributed Robotic Systems: A Team Formation Example

Modeling, design and testing of the software underlying distributed robotic systems is a challenging task, especially when a large number of mobile robots and task coordination are involved. Model continuity, the ability to use the same model of a system throughout its design phases, provides an effective way to manage this development complexity and maintain consistency of the software. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a team-formation multi-robot system. This is used as an example to demonstrate how a modeling and simulation environment, based on the DEVS formalism, can support model continuity in the design of distributed robotic systems. This example shows how the intelligent control models of the robots are first designed and tested via simulation and, when verified mapped to physical robots with DEVS-on-a-chip “brains” for execution.