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Programming goal-oriented behavior in collective adaptive systems is complex, requires high effort, and is failure-prone. If the system's user wants to deploy it in a real-world environment, hurdles get even higher: Programs urgently require to be situation-aware. With our framework Maple, we previously presented an approach for easing the act of programming such systems on the level of particular robot capabilities. In this paper, we extend our approach for ensemble programming with the possibility to address virtual swarm capabilities encapsulating collective behavior to whole groups of agents. By using the respective concepts in an extended version of hierarchical task networks and by adapting our self-organization mechanisms for executing plans resulting thereof, we can achieve that all agents, any agent, any other set of agents, or a swarm of agents execute (swarm) capabilities. Moreover, we extend the possibilities of expressing situation awareness during planning by introducing planning variables that can get modified at design-time or run-time as needed. We illustrate the possibilities with examples each. Further, we provide a graphical front-end offering the possibility to generate mission-specific problem domain descriptions for ensembles including a lightweight simulation for validating plans.
Swarm behavior can be very beneficial for real-world robot applications. While analyzing the current state of research, we identified that many studied swarm algorithms foremost aim at modifying the movement vector of the executing robot. In this paper, we demonstrate how we encapsulate this behavior in a general pattern that robots can execute with adjusted parameters for realizing different beneficial swarm algorithms. We integrate the pattern as a virtual swarm capability in our reference architecture for multipotent, reconfigurable multi-robot ensembles and demonstrate its application in proof of concepts. We further illustrate how we can lift the concept of virtual capabilities to also integrate other known approaches for collective system programming as virtual collective capabilities. As an example, we do so by integrating the execution platform for the Protelis aggregate programming language.
