21st July 2014. My presentation at MORSE 2014 (http://st.inf.tu-dresden.de/MORSE14) about a family of Domain-Specific Languages for specifying Civilian Missions of Multi-Robot Systems.

1. Davide Di Ruscio
Ivano Malavolta
Patrizio Pelliccione
A family of Domain-Specific Languages
for specifying Civilian Missions
of Multi-Robot Systems

2. Roadmap
Background
Challenges
The family of languages
Application to autonomous quadrotors
Conclusions and future work

3. Civilian missions today
• High costs
– team training and transportation
– operating costs
• Safety
– significant risks (e.g., fire, earthquake, etc.)
• Timing and endurance
– exhausting shifts
– activities stopped at night

4. Using robots for civilian missions [1]
Many civilian missions can be executed either by flying, ground or water robots

5. Multi-robots missions
Civilian missions can be executed by multiple robots
à lower mission completion time
à fault-tolerance w.r.t. mission goal fulfillment
à enables the use of highly-specialized robots
All the robots perform their actions to fulfil the common goal of
the mission
however...
common goal

6. Challenges
• On-site operators must be expert of all the types of used robots
– in terms of dynamics, hardware capabilities, etc.
• On-site operators have to simultaneously control a large number
of robots during the mission execution
• Robots provide very low-level APIs and very basic primitives
– error-prone development
– task-specific robots
– no reuse
These issues ask for
• abstraction
• automation

7. MDE for multi-robot missions
MDE allows all stakeholders to focus on models of the mission with
concepts that are:
• closer to the application domain
• independent from the specific robot technologies
• enabling automation à autonomous robots
http://mdse-book.com

8. Application scenario[2]

9. The family of languages
Mission
Context
Map
MML
BL
Behavior
BL models synthesis
Robots
configuration
Mission
Execution Engine
RL

10. Principles
Mask complexity
à usable by non-technical experts
à domain-specific concepts
Independence w.r.t. the types of robots
Reuse of models
Robots must be autonomous

11. Monitoring mission language (MML)
Mission layer: sequence of tasks executed by a swarm of robots
extensible

12. Monitoring mission language (MML)
Context layer: geographical areas that can influence the execution
of the mission
The focus is on spatial context

13. Robot language (RL)
Hardware and low-level configuration of each type of robot

14. Behaviour language (BL)
Atomic movements
and actions performed
by each robot of the
swarm

15. Involved stakeholders
Operator
in-the-field stakeholder specifying the mission
Robot engineer
– models a specific kind of robot
– develops the controller that instructs the robot on how to perform
BL basic operations
Platform extender
– extends the MML metamodel with new kinds of tasks
– develops a synthesizer for transforming each new task to its
corresponding BL operations
MML
RL + controller
MML + synthesizer

16. Extension for autonomous quadrotors
Special kind of helicopter with:
• high stability
• omni-directional
• smaller fixed-pitch rotors
à safer than classical helicopters
• simple to design and construct
• relatively inexpensive
image from http://goo.gl/FJFS5l
Issues
• require a trained pilot to operate them
• restricted to line-of-sight range

17. Languages extensions
unchanged
MML
BL
RL

18. Example (1)
MML model (in the tool)
PG1
NF1
NF2
R1
home

19. Example (2)
Robot model (Parrot)

20. Example (3)
Behavioural model
Drone&
D1&
Drone&
D2&
Drone&
D3&
Start&(ε,&ε)& Start&(ε,&ε)& Start&(ε,&ε)&
TakeOff&(ε,&ε)& TakeOff&(ε,&ε)& TakeOff&(ε,&ε)&
GoTo&(ε,&ε)&GoTo&(ε,&ε)& GoTo&(ε,&ε)&
GoTo&(ε,&{Photo})&GoTo&(ε,&{Photo})& GoTo&(ε,&{Photo})&
GoTo&(ε,{Photo,BroadCast(D3.R1.Done)})&
GoTo&(ε,&ε)&
Land&(ε,&ε)&
Stop&(ε,&ε)&
GoTo&(ε,&ε)&
Land&(ε,&ε)&
Stop&(ε,&ε)&
0GoTo&(ε,&{Photo,&&
BroadCast&(D2.PG1.Done)})&
0
GoTo&(ε,&ε)&
Land&(ε,&ε)&
Stop&(ε,&ε)&
GoTo(ε,&{Photo,&&
BroadCast&(D1.PG1.Done)})&
PG1 PG1
R1

21. Tool support
Editor for
MML models
M2M transformation
+
models validation
Layer of controllers that interpret BL
models at run-time
HTML5, CSS3,
JavaScript
Java + OCL
Java + ROS + Rosbridge
Drone driver
any

22. Conclusions

23. Future work
Extend the languages with timing constraints
Design a generic software architecture for
– mission editors, model transformations
– run-time engine for executing the mission
Safety and security as first-class elements both at mission
design-time and run-time
A more systematic language extension mechanism (like in [3])
Exercise the family of languages with other kinds of robot
(e.g., underwater missions)

24. References
[1] Skrzypietz, T.: Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Civilian Missions. BIGS policy paper.
Brandenburgisches Institut fur Gesellschaft und Sicherheit. BIGS (2012)
[2] Di Ruscio, D., Malavolta, I., Pelliccione, P.: Engineering a platform for mission planning of
autonomous and resilient quadrotors. In: Fifth International Workshop, on Software
Engineering for Resilient Systems , Springer Berlin Heidelberg (2013) 33–47
[3] Di Ruscio, D., Malavolta, I., Muccini, H., Pelliccione, P., Pierantonio, A.: Developing Next
Generation ADLs Through MDE Techniques. In: Procs. ICSE’10, ACM (2010) 85–94

25. + 39 380 70 21 600
Ivano Malavolta |
Gran Sasso Science Institute
iivanoo
ivano.malavolta@gssi.infn.it
www.di.univaq.it/malavolta
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