Modeling and controlling the structure of heterogeneous mobile robotic systems: A bigactor approach

In this paper we address the problem of modelling and controlling heterogeneous mobile robotic systems at a structure-level abstraction. We consider a system of mobile robotic entities that are able to observe, control, compute, and communicate. They operate upon an abstraction of the structure of the world that entails location and connectivity as first-class concepts. Our approach is to model mobile robotic entities as bigActors [18], a model of computation that combines bigraphs with the actor model for modeling structure-aware computation. As case study, we model a mission of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles performing an environmental monitoring mission.