MERMAID – MULTIPLE-ROBOT MIDDLEWARE FOR INTELLIGENT DECISION-MAKING

This paper describes the basic concepts and features of MeRMaID (Multiple-Robot Middleware for Intelligent Decision-making), a robot programming framework whose goal is to provide a simplified and systematic high-level behavior programming environment for multi-robot teams. MeRMaID constrains, on purpose, some of the programmer's options, and can accept plans described by state machines, Petri nets and other types of decision-making algorithms, including fuzzy-logic decision-making and rule-based systems. Its current version enables concurrent multi-platform programming, modularity (for flexible module replacement and easy module edition/modification), and independence from robot hardware (since it includes an Hardware Abstraction Layer).