We present our ongoing work on the design of macropro- gramming abstractions to program sensing and actuating applications using robot swarms. Robots can sample the environment and act on it where no other sensor can reach, e.g., to monitor the environment at altitude with aerial robots. Programming the individual behavior of multiple coordinat- ing robots is dificult. We design LiftOff, a macropro- gramming abstraction that allows to program robot swarms collectively, by creating the illusion of a single computing device that occupies the entire physical space of interest. We achieve this by giving variables and values in a pro- gramming language a spatial semantics. In LiftOff, values may be associated to a location, and programmers use the same variable to access diferent values at diferent locations, sparing the need to manually create a mapping from variables to spatial values. LiftOff applications execute synchronously or based on lazy evaluation. The former allows precise program analysis, e.g., usng model checking, whilst the latter potentially executes faster. In this paper, we report on LiftOff's initial design and prototypes.