Horocol language and Hardware modules for robots

This work inserts in the general field of collective robotics. In this paper, we present the results on the design and the conception of (1) our robotics component called Atom, (2) the informal semantics of the HoRoCoL language. The expressivity of the language is illustrated on a simple example. At the hardware level, we propose a versatile architecture easily adaptable for most mechatronic systems. The hardware is based on a processing unit developed around a CPU + FPGA computing system communicating through bluetooth. On this hardware we build a software architecture, where each robot embeds its own description in an XML file. Control interfaces or programming tools are self-reconfigurable, depending of the XML description of the robot. That enables quick technology transfer for many mechatronics applications. At the software level, we present the Horocol language for programming a society or teams of robots. An example shows the principal features of the Horocol language. This language has been developed to offer a solution to express the behaviours of a set of teams of robots or agents. We focus on the originality of this language which is in the instructions for programming the team coordination.