Virtualization in Robot Swarms: Past, Present, and Future

Robot swarms have come a long way since the first mobile sensor/actuator networks. Since then, we have seen the rise of operating systems for robots and swarm operating systems that ease the use of robots, and especially of large swarms of them, a lot. Still, the description of a task is often not easy and best done by experts. In this paper we envision future swarm operating systems, where task descriptions take a form which can be realized by non-experts. We describe our idea of hugely increased virtualization in the swarm and how this can be used to realize the aforementioned vision.