Online Modifications of High-Level Swarm Behaviors

Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated how one can write high-level specifications for swarm behaviors and automatically create controllers for the individual robots to achieve the overall swarm task. In this paper, we address the question of how to modify, during execution, the desired behavior while maintaining guarantees on the behavior, if possible; we define three types of modification: changing the maximum number of robots in a region of the workspace, changing the connectivity of the workspace, and redistributing robots. During execution, if the specification is modified, we update the controller by creating local patches. Given the starting and ending state of the patch, we jointly use a symbolic synthesis tool and a constraint programming solver to synthesize robot control. We demonstrate our approach in simulation.