Integrated Development Environment for the Actualization of Swarms (IDEAS)

This proposal is for an Integrated Development Environment for the Actualization of Swarms (IDEAS), which embodies two novel ideas inspired by modern IDEs used by software developers to build and debug software: (1) IDEAS will feature a graphical end-user tool for creating and testing swarming behaviors; the IDEAS user will be empowered to create useful swarming behavior aided by a suite of intelligent tools that encode expert knowledge; and (2) IDEAS will allow complex behaviors to be created that flexibly sequence specific swarming behaviors to complete multi-stage missions.Sequencing multiple swarming behaviors allows for practical missions to be executed, and intelligent support in IDEAS will transparently provide the connections that allow the swarm to transition between behaviors in an appropriate way. There has been a large volume of academic research on swarms and many interesting behaviors produced in a lab environment.The goal of our proposed effort is to take the promising behavior that has been demonstrated in the lab and make it relevant and practically useful for Army customers.To accomplish this, IDEAS behavior definition will incorporate a sound and proven modeling formalism based on Petri-Net diagrams that we have successfully applied on several unmanned system programs.