Object Interaction Language (OIL): An intent-based language for programming self-organized sensor/actuator networks

This paper introduces the Object Interaction Language (OIL) that allows programming and coordination of distributed, heterogeneous sensor-actuator networks, such as sensor networks and multi-robot systems. OIL is an interpreted, object oriented language and is contained in an OIL environment. An OIL environment provides communication between agents and allows agents to exchange code snippets among each other. Possible implementations of OIL environments can be - in the simplest case - a sheet of paper with OIL code literally printed on it, or a computational agent endowed with sensors, actuators and wireless communication. The atomic primitive in OIL is the intent for which implementation is resolved during runtime, potentially using code from other OIL environments and leading to distributed execution. We develop the structure of the language and demonstrate its key properties using a distributed computation task that is parallelized via an OIL environment. We evaluate the algorithm empirically by running OIL code on a team of six computational agents that communicate wirelessly. We then show experimentally how OIL can be used to allocate sensing and mobility in a multi-robot system using a case study in navigation, where one robot dynamically provides laser range data to another robot which is blind to its environment.