Swarms of Mobile Robots: Towards Versatility with Safety

Abstract

We present Pactole, a formal framework to design and prove the correctness of protocols (or the impossibility of their existence) that target mobile robotic swarms. Unlike previous approaches, our methodology unifies in a single formalism the execution model, the problem specification, the protocol, and its proof of correctness. The Pactole framework makes use of the Coq proof assistant, and is specially targeted at protocol designers and problem specifiers, so that a common unambiguous language is used from the very early stages of protocol development. We stress the underlying framework design principles to enable high expressivity and modularity, and provide concrete examples about how the Pactole framework can be used to tackle actual problems, some previously addressed by the Distributed Computing community, but also new problems, while being certified correct.

Keywords

• distributed algorithm
• mobile autonomous robots
• formal proof