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)

Special Issue on State of the Art in Maritime Autonomous Surface and Underwater Vehicles

Special Issue Guest Editors: Terry Huntsberger, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Michael Keegan, Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Newport Division & Robert Brizzolara, Office of Naval Research

This special issue focuses on state-of-the-art developments in maritime autonomy and control for autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The maritime domain poses a number of challenges for the development of autonomy algorithms for these types of vehicles. Among the these challenges are the oftentimes low bandwidth or no communication links with a control station, no easy access to GPS information for localization in the case of AUVs, widely varying sea-state conditions, possible limited sensing capabilities due to power and volume constraints, and strong currents and winds. A previous (June 2007) Special Issue of the Journal of Field Robotics on AUVs concentrated on platforms, monitoring and characterization of maritime environments, and vehicle health management.  The goal of this special issue is to publish outstanding results in the maturation and testing of the autonomy technologies for both autonomous sea surface and underwater vehicles that are currently being fielded through collaborations between university, industry and military. The concentration of the special issue will be on systems that have been tested in the field.

List of topics

1. •Autonomy for coordinated operations between autonomous maritime vehicles
   

2. •Real-time, onboard optimization of planning & execution
   

3. •Autonomy for heterogeneous maritime vehicles
   

4. •Adaptive and/or variable levels of autonomy
   

5. •Maritime image understanding for domain awareness
   

6. •Higher-level autonomy algorithms in the decision-making and control loops
   

7. •Sensors and sensor processing algorithms/fusion for maritime vehicle autonomy
   

8. •Obstacle avoidance, and other GNC functions for autonomous navigation
   

9. •Human-machine interfaces for control of single and multiple maritime autonomous vehicles
   

10. •Biologically inspired approaches to intelligent autonomy for autonomous maritime vehicles
    

11. •Collaborative control of multiple heterogeneous autonomous vehicles
    

12. •Fleet management of autonomous vehicles operating under heterogeneous constraints on control and communication 
    

Authors are encouraged to submit multimedia attachments to the paper (data sets, models and videos) as a means of enhancing the submission.

Important Dates:

1. •January 15, 2010 – Submission of manuscripts
   

2. •April 1, 2010 – Reviews sent to the authors
   

3. •June 1, 2010 – Final manuscripts due for publication
   

For comments, suggestions, or requests, please send email to Terry Huntsberger (terry.huntsberger@jpl.nasa.gov)