Development and command-control tools for many-robot systems

An initial concept is presented for a set of communications and command-control capabilities that can facilitate the development process for a system consisting of an arbitrarily large number of relatively simple (and probably small and inexpensive, although not necessarily `micro') robots--mechanisms to allow the human developer to quickly and easily see into the internal state of large numbers of robots, and to quickly and easily make changes to the robots' behaviors. The interface between the control station and the developer must be carefully designed in order to provide a serviceable development environment, and this environment, or subsets of it, should then evolve into the operator's station for deployed systems that require active control and monitoring. The development environment must provide the developer with a precise model for (re-) programming the elements of the system, while the system operator will require only the simplest functional model of the system as a whole that can support mission needs, combined with a convenient way to tell the system what to do.