Abstract
Previous works on formally studying mobile robotic swarms consider necessary and sufficient system hypotheses enabling to solve theoretical benchmark problems (geometric pattern formation, gathering, scattering, etc.). We argue that formal methods can also help in the early design stage of mobile robotic swarms correct-by-design protocols, even for tasks closer to real-world use cases and not previously studied theoretically. Our position is supported by a concrete case study. Starting from a real-world case scenario, we jointly design the formal problem specification, a family of protocols that are able to solve the problem, and their corresponding proof of correctness, all expressed with the same formal framework. The concrete framework we use for our development is the Pactole library based on the Coq proof assistant.
This work was partially supported by Project SAPPORO of the French National Research Agency (ANR) under the reference 2019-CE25-0005-1.
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Notes
- 1.
Yamashita received the “Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing” for his seminal work on this model.
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Balabonski, T., Courtieu, P., Pelle, R., Rieg, L., Tixeuil, S., Urbain, X. (2021). Computer Aided Formal Design of Swarm Robotics Algorithms. In: Johnen, C., Schiller, E.M., Schmid, S. (eds) Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems. SSS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13046. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91081-5_31
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