Michael P. Ashley-Rollman, Seth Copen Goldstein, Peter Lee, Todd C. Mowry, and Padmanabhan Pillai
@inproceedings{ashley-rollman-iros07,
author = {Ashley-Rollman, Michael P. and Goldstein, Seth Copen and
Lee, Peter and Mowry, Todd C. and Pillai, Padmanabhan},
title = {Meld: A Declarative Approach to Programming Ensembles},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems ({IROS '07})},
year = {2007},
month = {October},
keywords = {Programming Languages},
abstract = {This paper presents Meld, a programming language for
modular robots, i.e., for independently executing robots where
inter-robot communication is limited to immediate neighbors. Meld
is a declarative language, based on P2, a logic-programming
language originally designed for programming overlay networks. By
using logic programming, the code for an ensemble of robots can
be written from a global perspective, as opposed to a large
collection of independent robot views. This greatly simplifies
the thought process needed for programming large ensembles.
Initial experience shows that this also leads to a considerable
reduction in code size and complexity. An initial implementation
of Meld has been completed and has been used to demonstrate its
effectiveness in the Claytronics simulator. Early results
indicate that Meld programs are considerably more concise (more
than 20x shorter) than programs written in C++, while running
nearly as efficiently.},
url = {http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~claytronics/papers/ashley-rollman-iros07.pdf}
}
