Exploiting Aggregate Programming in a Multi-Robot Service Prototype

2026-04-08

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenges of coordination complexity and environmental coupling that often hinder multi-robot systems in applications such as healthcare, exploration, and rescue. The study proposes and implements the first real-world multi-robot service prototype based on Aggregate Programming (AP), leveraging neighborhood-based communication to construct a distributed coordination framework that supports environmental adaptability and fault tolerance. By integrating both simulation and physical robot experiments, the approach is validated in a realistic university library setting, demonstrating its feasibility, robustness, and scalability. This research marks the first successful deployment of aggregate programming in an actual multi-robot system, establishing a novel paradigm for distributed robotic collaboration.

Abstract

Multi-robot systems are becoming increasingly relevant within diverse application domains, such as healthcare, exploration, and rescue missions. However, building such systems is still a significant challenge, since it adds the complexities of the physical nature of robots and their environments to those inherent in coordinating any distributed (multi-agent) system. Aggregate Programming (AP) has recently emerged as a promising approach to engineering resilient, distributed systems with proximity-based communication, and is notably supported by practical frameworks. In this paper we present a prototype of a multi-robot service system, which adopts AP for the design and implementation of its coordination software. The prototype has been validated both with simulations, and with tests in a University library.

Problem

• multi-robot systems
• distributed coordination
• aggregate programming
• resilient systems
• proximity-based communication

Innovation

• Aggregate Programming
• multi-robot systems
• distributed coordination
• proximity-based communication
• service robotics