GenSwarm: Scalable Multi-Robot Code-Policy Generation and Deployment via Language Models

The present paradigm of developing multi-robot systems follows a complex and labor-intensive process that involves steps like task analysis, algorithm design, code programming, simulation validation, and real-world deployment. This paradigm requires skilled professionals who are familiar with both theories and software/hardware implementation, incurring high costs in human resources. Moreover, it does not adapt well to dynamically changing tasks: the emergence of a new task requires the repetition of the complex process. Automatic generation and deployment of control policies for multi-robot systems is an appealing paradigm, as it promises substantial savings in terms of human effort and other resources [3-5]. However, this paradigm is nontrivial to realize as a multi-robot system as a whole cannot be programmed directly; rather, a desired collective behavior can be achieved only by programming each individual robot, which relies on its locally available information. Previous methods for automatic development of multi-robot swarming are primarily based on optimization techniques [3, 5]. For instance, an objective function is first crafted to mathematically describe a desired task and then optimized to generate policies through methods such as evolutionary computation [5-7] or systematic search [8]. Despite their promise, these optimization methods face the common limitation of requiring manual crafting of objective functions.