Buzz: A programming language designed for robot clusters

Many people should have seen it before, or seen in the documentary that the birds flew in the same flight path and painted a beautiful scene in the air. But this scene has never been repeated by robots or ground robots that can fly. There are two main reasons. First, no one can develop robots with the same agility and speed. Even if the agility problem is solved, there is still a second reason, that is, there is no simple way to control such a group of robots.

The first reason is changing rapidly. Explosive growth has been seen in cheap robots with outstanding capabilities. Numerous researchers, amateurs, and artists have tried to use these robots, hoping to research and develop behaviors similar to swarming.

Researchers have found that controlling a large number of identical robots is a challenge. Due to the lack of a specific programming language, they always have to solve the same problem in the same way. In other words, they want to reinvent the "wheels."

Today, Carlo Pinciroli of the Montreal Institute of Technology in Canada and his team say they have developed a programming language called Buzz for this purpose. This is a new programming language for a wide variety of robot clusters.

There are two opposite ways to control a robot cluster. The first is a bottom-up approach that controls each robot individually. This is useful for fine-tuning the interaction between specific robots, but as the size of the cluster grows, it becomes more and more difficult to manage.

Another method is top-down, where the cluster is controlled as a whole. This is effective for controlling large clusters, but does not allow fine-tuning of the behavior of individual robots.

Pinciroli and his team said that the new language they developed allowed them to be implemented. They said: "The language that controls clustered robots must combine bottom-up and top-down, allowing developers to pick the most comfortable way to express clustering algorithms."

Buzz also combines directives with predictive results in an intuitive way, making it easier for people to use. It can also be extended so it can be used effectively in clusters of different sizes.

Pinciroli said that the absence of a standardized programming language can significantly hinder future progress because there is no easy way for researchers to share their work and make breakthroughs on the basis of others.

The team believes that one of the most important aspects of Buzz is that it may become a promoter of complex group robotic systems research.

Via technologyreview

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