Compositional Design of Multi-Robot Systems Control Software on ROS

This paper presents a methodology that relies on Assume-Guarantee Contracts to decompose the problem of synthesizing control software for a multi-robot system. Initially, each contract describes either a component (e.g., a robot) or an aspect of the system. Then, the design problem is decomposed into different synthesis and verification sub-problems, allowing to tackle the complexity involved in the design process. The design problem is then recomposed by exploiting the rigorousness provided by contracts. This allows us to achieve system-level simulation capable to be used for validating the entire design. Once validated, the software synthesized during the process can be integrated into Robot Operating System (ROS) nodes and executed using state-of-the-practice packages and tools for modern robotic systems.We apply the methodology to generate a control strategy for an autonomous goods transportation system. Our results show a massive reduction of the time required to obtain automatically the control software implementing a multi-robot mission.