Synthesizing Capabilities for Collective Adaptive Systems from Self-descriptive Hardware Devices Bridging the Reality Gap

摘要

In the field of collective adaptive systems (CASs) robotic applications are mostly executed in a simulated environment with simulated hardware and abstract capabilities due to their complexity. These simulated systems usually cannot be applied in reality without major modifications. We propose an approach to bridge the gap between abstract capabilities and the execution of concrete capabilities on real hardware through a semantic description of the hardware itself, its drivers, interfaces and capabilities, enabling the realization of CAS in the real world. With a plug and play mechanism for hardware modules and the semantic description it is now possible to develop a CAS without committing to a concrete set of hardware and, moreover, the set of hardware to the requirements of the system.