Engineering Safety in Swarm Robotics

Robotics, artificial intelligence, and the Internet-of-Things are driving current research and development for the technology sector. Robotic and multi-robot systems are becoming pervasive and more and more lives rely on their proper functioning in transportation, medical systems, personal robotics, and manufacturing. Assuring the security and safety of these systems is of primary importance to guarantee the real-world applicability of current research, and we argue that it should be an integral part of system design. Current software standards for safety and security for critical systems (e.g. industrial and aerospace) are not directly applicable to the large distributed systems that are envisioned for the near future. In this paper, we propose to address safety and security of swarm robotics systems at the programming language level. We propose to extend the Buzz multi-robot scripting language with constructs and code analysis that allow the verification of safety and security during development. We believe that detecting and correcting issues with what are inherently emergent systems, i.e. where collective behavior might not be immediately apparent from a single robot's code, during development would allow for a more effective advancement of swarm robotics.