Dolphin: a task orchestration language for autonomous vehicle networks

TL;DR

Dolphin is an extensible programming language designed for task orchestration in autonomous vehicle networks, enabling complex multi-vehicle task coordination through a flexible, compositional syntax integrated with robotic toolkits.

Contribution

The paper introduces Dolphin, a novel task orchestration language tailored for autonomous vehicle networks, with a flexible syntax and integration capabilities for robotic systems.

Findings

Successful field tests with underwater and aerial vehicles

Effective support for concurrent, sequential, and event-based task flows

Seamless integration with robotic toolkits

Abstract

We present Dolphin, an extensible programming language for autonomous vehicle networks. A Dolphin program expresses an orchestrated execution of tasks defined compositionally for multiple vehicles. Building upon the base case of elementary one-vehicle tasks, the built-in operators include support for composing tasks in several forms, for instance according to concurrent, sequential, or event-based task flow. The language is implemented as a Groovy DSL, facilitating extension and integration with external software packages, in particular robotic toolkits. The paper describes the Dolphin language, its integration with an open-source toolchain for autonomous vehicles, and results from field tests using unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).