Special Issue on Multiple Heterogeneous Field Robot Systems

Special Issue Guest Editors: Jonathan How, MIT, Ani Hsieh, Drexel University, & Simon Lacroix, LAAS/CNRS

The deployment of heterogeneous robots can lead to important operational benefits in many field application contexts. By exploiting the perception and action complementarities of heterogeneous robots, innovative cooperation and assistance schemes can be defined, and lead to more efficient and robust operations. Typical applications include military (cooperative search and track using air/ground robots) and civilian (ocean sampling using submarines and surface sea vehicles, and weather/plume tracking using multiple air vehicles). The heterogeneity of the systems can also reside in their autonomy level, e.g. teams of ground or aerial vehicles in which piloted and autonomous systems cooperate.

The cooperation between heterogeneous robots brings forth several challenges, mainly related to perception and decision, that are not considered in classical homogeneous multi-robots systems. For instance, the achievement of cooperating schemes require that the robots build and share common environment representations: within heterogeneous robot teams, this calls for the development of environment modeling processes that are able to fuse data acquired by various sensor types in very different conditions. From a decisional point of view, the complementarities of the robot yields the definition of non-symmetric cooperation schemes to achieve tasks that can not be handled by a single robot, e.g. in which one robot assists the other to localize it or to communicate with others: the heterogeneous capacities of the robots enrich the problems of

mission/task planning and of supervision.

The goal of this special issue is to gather the current state of the art on the issues raised by heterogeneous field robot teams. We invite papers that exhibits theory, methods and experiments for the deployment of heterogeneous field robots. A non-exclusive list of possible topics is:

1. •Mapping and localization issues among heterogeneous robots
   

2. •Self-organization, reconfiguration, cooperation strategies and decision making in heterogeneous robots teams
   

3. •Marsupial robotics and associated cooperation strategies
   

4. •Cooperation between robots with different levels of autonomy
   

5. •Planning architectures (hierarchical and distributed) and algorithms for multi-agent teams
   

6. •Distributed estimation and sensor/information fusion with communication constraints
   

7. •Resource allocation and management, including sensor tasking, control, and actuation for mobile sensor networks
   

8. •Unique applications and testbeds/experiments for heterogeneous robot teams
   

9. •Effective integration of human operators and robots, and manned and unmanned assets
   

10. •Papers containing large data sets collected by a heterogeneous team of robots
    

Papers should also provide description and analyses of actual field experiments. Lessons learned in development and operation are also pertinent. JFR encourages multimedia content and this special issue in

particular encourages the submission of papers/field reports containing large data sets, illustrative videos of demonstrations and experiments.

Important Dates:

1. •April 30, 2010 – Submission of manuscripts
   

2. •Aug 21, 2010 – Reviews sent to the authors
   

3. •Oct 31, 2010 – Final manuscripts due for publication
   

For comments, suggestions, or requests, please send email to Ani Hsieh (mhsieh1@drexel.edu)