Disciplined use of BPMN for mission modeling of Multi-Robot Systems

Nowadays, Multi-Robot Systems are an emerging research field under the umbrella of Cyber-Physical Systems. They consist of a group of robots that cooperate to accomplish a common mission. Examples of these systems are present in many application fields, e.g., agriculture, manufacture, industry, military, and health. As a consequence, there exist many frameworks facilitating the development of robotics systems. However, these tools require high skills for programming each robot's behavior and coordinating the interactions among them, which overall should produce the cooperative behavior of the Multi-Robot System needed to carry out its mission successfully. To address this problem, we propose an approach for high-level modeling the cooperative behavior of Multi-Robot Systems through disciplined use of collaboration diagrams as they are provided by the BPMN 2.0 standard. The definition of our modeling proposal has been driven by ROS2, taken as the reference framework for programming robotics systems, and its DDS implementation for intra- and inter-robot communication. We illustrate the proposed approach through a Multi-Robot System in a smart agriculture scenario.