BittyBuzz: A Swarm Robotics Runtime for Tiny Systems

TL;DR

BittyBuzz is a lightweight runtime platform enabling the Buzz programming language to operate on microcontrollers with severe resource constraints, facilitating development of swarm robotics systems on low-cost, resource-limited hardware.

Contribution

This paper introduces BittyBuzz, a novel runtime that adapts Buzz for microcontrollers, addressing the lack of dedicated swarm robotics software for resource-constrained systems.

Findings

Successfully integrated with three robotic platforms

Maintains small memory footprint suitable for microcontrollers

Enables implementation of common swarm behaviors

Abstract

Swarm robotics is an emerging field of research which is increasingly attracting attention thanks to the advances in robotics and its potential applications. However, despite the enthusiasm surrounding this area of research, software development for swarm robotics is still a tedious task. That fact is partly due to the lack of dedicated solutions, in particular for low-cost systems to be produced in large numbers and that can have important resource constraints. To address this issue, we introduce BittyBuzz, a novel runtime platform: it allows Buzz, a domain-specific language, to run on microcontrollers while maintaining dynamic memory management. BittyBuzz is designed to fit a flash memory as small as 32 kB (with usable space for scripts) and work with as little as 2 kB of RAM. In this work, we introduce the BittyBuzz implementation, its differences from the original Buzz virtual machine, and its advantages for swarm robotics systems. We show that BittyBuzz is successfully integrated with three robotic platforms with minimal memory footprint and conduct experiments to show computation performance of BittyBuzz. Results show that BittyBuzz can be effectively used to implement common swarm behaviors on microcontroller-based systems.