Energy-efficient distributed programming model for swarm robot

A swarm robot system is a multi-robot system which consists of a large number of simple, lightweight and interoperating robots. Since it mimics the behaviors of social insects, it is critical to program artificial swarm intelligence in a versatile manner. Distributed, scalable and severely resource-limited nature of swarm robotics, however, makes it very difficult to write application programs. In this paper, we propose an easy-to-use and effective programming model that addresses such programming difficulties as well as the energy-efficient deployment and execution of swarm intelligence programs. Specifically, the proposed model lets programmers concentrate on writing a core swarm intelligence algorithm while abstracting the implementation issues such as communication, synchronization and parallel processing of the algorithms. In order to show the utility and viability of the proposed approach, we have demonstrated a 3D map building application and performed experiments. The results show that the proposed approach reduces data traffic up to 82% with an acceptable error.