Adopting MDE for Specifying and Executing Civilian Missions of Mobile Multi-Robot Systems

Robots are meant to replace humans for a broad variety of everyday tasks, such as environmental monitoring or patrolling large public areas for security assurance. The main focus of researchers and practitioners has been on providing tailored software and hardware solutions for very specific and often complex tasks. On one hand, these solutions show great potential and provide advanced capabilities for solving the specific task. On the other hand, the polarized attention to task-specific solutions makes them hard to reuse, customize, and combine. In this paper we propose a family of domain-specific modeling languages for the specification of civilian missions of mobile multi-robot systems. These missions are meant to be described in terms of models that are: 1) closer to the general problem domain; 2) independent from the underlying technologies; 3) ready to be analyzed, simulated, and executed; and 4) extensible to new application domains, thus opening up the use of robots to even non-technical operators. Moreover, we show the applicability of the proposed family of languages in two real-world application domains: unmanned multicopters and autonomous underwater vehicles.