Development of a flexible language for disturbance description for multi-robot missions

This paper introduces the Disturbance Description Language (DDL), an XML dialect intended to describe a number of anomalous elements that can occur in a given scenario (including people, vehicles, fire or focus of pollution) and their respective properties, such as temporal availability, location, motion pattern and details for individual components, such as growth pattern and detectability. This dialect is part of a framework to support the execution of cooperative missions by a group of vehicles, in a simulated, augmented or real environment. An interface was incorporated into the framework, for creating and editing XML files following the defined schema. Once the information is correctly specified, it can be used in the framework, thus facilitating the process of environment disturbances specification and deployment. A survey answered by both practitioners and researchers shows that the degree of satisfaction with DDL is elevated (the overall evaluation of DDL achieved a 4.14 score (out of 5), with 81.1% of the answers being equal to or above 4); also, the usability of the interface was evaluated, having achieved a score of 83.6 in the SUS scale. These results imply that DDL is flexible enough to represent several types of disturbances, through a user‐friendly interface.