The Swarm as a Service: Virtualization of Motion

A defining aspect of Cyber-physical systems are the sensors and actuators of a computing system, which interact with the physical world. While sensors and actuators can take on many different forms, one type of actuator, namely motors, usually has the highest influence on the lifetime due to the high energy consumption. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce physical movement of robots as much as possible without reducing the quality of the application. In this paper we introduce virtual movement of applications, meaning that parts of an application can be executed on arbitrary robots that can reach the locations defined by the application programmer with minimal effort. As we assume that robots will be shared by multiple applications, programming virtual movement within the application is not only cumbersome, but impossible, as the location and status of a robot may be changed by a different application. Therefore, we provide a middleware abstraction which takes care of virtual movement and hides it from the application programmer.