Towards systematic engineering of collaborative heterogeneous robotic systems.

Collaborative heterogeneous robotic systems are distributed and interconnected multi-robot systems whose members can have different capabilities and can perform specialised tasks. Existing engineering processes and tools facilitate the development of various robotic aspects including kinematics, sensing and, architecture, through high-level design and low-level code generation. Although there are several frameworks and middleware, providing infrastructure for the development of single-robot and homogeneous multi-robot applications, there is lack of systematic methods and tools supporting the engineering of heterogeneous multi-robot systems and the analysis of collaborative intelligence. In this paper, we present our vision for a framework that supports the specification of collaborative heterogeneous robotic systems, generation of platform-specific code, and efficient exploration and exercise of collective intelligence algorithms.