Programming Multi-Robot Systems with X-KLAIM

Software development for robotics applications is still a major challenge that becomes even more complex when considering a Multi-Robot System (MRS). Such a distributed software has to perform multiple cooperating tasks in a well-coordinated manner to avoid unsatisfactory emerging behavior. This paper provides an approach for programming MRSs at a high abstraction level using the programming language X-KLAIM. The computation and communication model of X-KLAIM, based on multiple distributed tuple spaces, permits to coordinate with the same abstractions and mechanisms both intra- and inter-robot interactions of an MRS. This allows developers to focus on MRS behavior, achieving readable and maintainable code. The proposed approach can be used in practice through the integration of X-KLAIM and the popular robotics framework ROS. We show the proposal’s feasibility and effectiveness by implementing an MRS scenario.