A Behavior-Centric Programming Framework for Drone Systems with Digital Twin Backends

This paper contributes to providing multiple views for a physical system’s behavior dynamically to programmers and to enhance liveness and conformity in its programming. To develop physical systems, we need to consider many concerns such as weather, terrain, and traffic conditions. In current digital-twin-based development of autonomous systems, these are organized in layers. Also, our research group has contributed to this problem. However, even if we use such a development environment, we feel annoyed in some places. The cause is that we cannot easily distinguish the behavior of the physical system before and after changing programs. For observing behavior, programmers need to connect components or external systems. Also, if programmers want to focus only on system behavior, they need several actions to select the mode. Additionally, we cannot dynamically change behavior in popular development environments based on general digital twins. The programming of physical systems is naturally exploratory. Therefore, to provide a more comfortable development environment for exploratory programming, we pose the following research issues.