A family of domain-specific languages for specifying civilian missions of multi-robot systems

The next future will be pervaded by robots performing a variety of tasks (e.g., environmental monitoring, patrolling large public areas for security assurance). So far, researchers and practitioners are mainly focusing on hardware/software solutions for specialized and complex tasks; however, despite the accuracy and the advanced capabilities of current solutions, this trend leads to task-specific solutions, difficult to be reused and combined. In this paper we propose a family of domain-specific languages for specifying missions of multi-robot systems by means of models that are (i) independent from the technologies, (ii) ready to be analysed, simulated, and executed, (iii) extensible to new application areas, and (iv) closer to the problem domain, thus democratizing the use of robots to non-technical operators. We show the applicability of the proposed family of languages in a real project in the domain of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles.