SwarmTalk - Towards Benchmark Software Suites for Swarm Robotics Platforms

With nearly every new swarm robotic platform built, the designers develop its software stack, from low-level drivers to high-level algorithmic implementations. And while the different software stacks frequently share components, especially in robot-to-robot communication, these common components are also developed from scratch time and again. We present SwarmTalk, a new communication library that can be quickly ported to new and existing swarm hardware. SwarmTalk adopts a publish-subscribe communication model that satisfies the severe hardware constraints found in many swarms, and provides an easy-to-use programming interface. We port our SwarmTalk prototype to two hardware swarm platforms and two simulator-based platforms, and implement commonly-used swarm algorithms on these four platforms. We present the design and implementation of SwarmTalk, discuss some of the system challenges in implementation and cross-platform porting, and report on our initial experiences as a common communication abstraction for a community benchmarking suite.