NASA is researching advanced technologiesfor future exploration missions using intelligent swarmsof robotic vehicles. One of these missions is the Au-tonomous Nano Technology Swarm (ANTS) mission thatwill explore the asteroid belt using 1,000 cooperative au-tonomous spacecraft.From the engineering point of view, the complexityof this kind of systems is one of the main challengesthat has to be overcame, since it makes the behavior ofthe swarm unpredictable. In NASA, many approachesare being explored towards this goal, mainly, a tailoredsoftware engineering approach for this kind of systems,called agent-oriented software engineering, and formalmethods. In this paper, we report on the main advanceswe have done towards modelling, implementing, and test-ing NASA swarms-based concept missions.
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