Systemic support for transaction-based spatial-temporal programming of mobile robot swarms

In this paper, we present an approach to support transaction-based spatial-temporal programming of mobile robot swarms on a systemic level. We introduce a programming model for swarms of mobile robots. Swarm applications consist of concurrent, distributed and context-aware actions. We provide distributed transactions in order to guarantee atomic execution of a set of dependent actions. We distinguish between schedulability and executability of a set of actions. In order to guarantee executability of a distributed transaction of spatial-temporal actions, we present the concept of path alternatives and a time-based two-phase commit protocol in order to assure consistency. We show the feasibility of our approach by a proof-of-concept.