Integrated Debugging of Large Modular Robot Ensembles

Creatively misquoting Thomas Hobbes, the process of software debugging is nasty, brutish, and all too long. This holds all the more true in robotics, which frequently involves concurrency, extensive nondeterminisism, event-driven components, complex state machines, and difficult platform limitations. Inspired by the challenges we have encountered while attempting to debug software on simulated ensembles of tens of thousands of modular robots, we have developed a new debugging tool particularly suited to the characteristics of highly parallel, event- and state-driven robotics software. Our state capture and introspection system also provides data that may be used in higher-level debugging tools as well. We report on the design of this promising debugging system, and on our experiences with it so far.