  Swarm robotics is an emerging field of research which is increasingly
attracting attention thanks to the advances in robotics and its potential
applications. However, despite the enthusiasm surrounding this area of
research, software development for swarm robotics is still a tedious task. That
fact is partly due to the lack of dedicated solutions, in particular for
low-cost systems to be produced in large numbers and that can have important
resource constraints. To address this issue, we introduce BittyBuzz, a novel
runtime platform: it allows Buzz, a domain-specific language, to run on
microcontrollers while maintaining dynamic memory management. BittyBuzz is
designed to fit a flash memory as small as 32 kB (with usable space for
scripts) and work with as little as 2 kB of RAM. In this work, we introduce the
BittyBuzz implementation, its differences from the original Buzz virtual
machine, and its advantages for swarm robotics systems. We show that BittyBuzz
is successfully integrated with three robotic platforms with minimal memory
footprint and conduct experiments to show computation performance of BittyBuzz.
Results show that BittyBuzz can be effectively used to implement common swarm
behaviors on microcontroller-based systems.
