Buzz is a novel programming language for heterogeneous robots swarms.
Buzz advocates a compositional approach, by offering primitives to define swarm behaviors both in a bottom-up and in a top-down fashion.
Bottom-up primitives include robot-wise commands and manipulation of neighborhood data through mapping/reducing/filtering operations.
Top-down primitives allow for the dynamic management of robot teams, and for sharing information globally across the swarm.
Self-organization results from the fact that the Buzz run-time platform is purely distributed.
The language can be extended to add new primitives (thus supporting heterogeneous robot swarms) and can be laid on top of other frameworks, such as ROS.
More information is available at http://the.swarming.buzz/wiki/doku.php?id=start.
Rosbuzz package is the ROS version of Buzz. The package contains a node called “rosbuzz_node”, which implements buzz virtual machine (BVM) as a node in ROS.
Note : Before launching the ROSBuzz node, verify all the parameters in the launch file. A launch file using gdb is available also (rosbuzzd.launch).
* Buzz scripts: Several behavioral scripts are included in the "buzz_Scripts" folder, such as "graphformGPS.bzz" uses in the ICRA publication below and the "testaloneWP.bzz" to control a single drone with a ".csv" list of waypoints. The script "empty.bzz" is a template script.
The package subscribes to sensor_msgs/NavSatFix message "global_position/global", to a std_msgs/Float64 message "global_position/rel_alt" and to a geometry_msgs/PoseStamped message "local_position/pose".
The package subscribes to mavros_msgs/BatteryStatus message "battery" and to either a mavros_msgs/ExtendedState message "extended_state" or a mavros_msgs/State message "state".
The package offers a mavros_msgs/CommandLong service "buzzcmd" to control its state. In the "misc" folder a bash script shows how to control the Buzz states from the command line.
* ROS and Buzz : consensus-based behaviors for heterogeneous teams. St-Onge, D., Shankar Varadharajan, V., Li, G., Svogor, I. and Beltrame, G. arXiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08843
* Over-The-Air Updates for Robotic Swarms. Submitted to IEEE Software (August 2017). 8pgs. Shankar Varadharajan, V., St-Onge, D., Guß, C. and Beltrame, G.