Modeling and Execution of Coordinated Missions in Reconfigurable Robot Ensembles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) can support various scenarios, e.g., serve as measuring instruments for climate research, help rescue forces in disaster scenarios or autonomously inspect critical infrastructure. To accomplish their respective tasks, UAVs are often equipped with different sensors and in some scenarios used in ensembles to work together cooperatively. In this paper, we present the Block Definition Language (BDL) for modeling and executing UAV missions. The BDL supports both the use of exchangeable sensors and appropriate coordination mechanisms for robot ensembles. We demonstrate our plugin mechanism in a proof of concept using the BDL in conjunction with the robotic middleware ROS for hardware control and robot synchronization.