Teams of heterogeneous devices pursuing a common objective are envisioned to be a viable and effective solution for many civil, societal and military applications. A large body of research, from various perspectives, have been produced by both the ad hoc
networking and the robotics research communities to achieve self-organization and coordination of groups of sensors, actuators, robots or drones toward target-oriented missions. But, the convergence of objectives and methodologies of the two disciplines is still open for further significant research efforts and challenging problems remain. The research on ad hoc networks, autonomic networks, cyber physical systems, self-organizing networks and machine-to-machine communications has involved issues, concepts and challenges that are useful for characterizing the pathway toward the formalization of the theory and the definition of algorithms for Wireless Networked Robotics (WNR). WNR brings together the physical control of the devices along with their communication capabilities and it includes that so far have been either neglected or only partially explored by the ad hoc networking and the robotics research communities.
In WNR, the role of communication is to foster cooperation and information sharing among the devices and to permit that mission objectives and task division lead actions, communications and reasoning of the devices. Communication can be explicit when the
devices exchange information with each other regarding their internal status, their roles and the target of the mission, or implicit when they ground their decisions according to the sensing and observation of the surrounding devices. In both cases,
communication schemes for coordination and control of groups of intelligent devices can draw inspiration from natural systems, where common objectives are pursued through the explicit or implicit interaction of single, resource constrained elements of a group. More specifically, swarm intelligence and swarm robotics offer several solutions for the coordination of devices based on direct/indirect communications.
At the same time, the motion capabilities of the devices call for a new communication paradigm, where mobility is seen as a facility to exploit in order to improve the performance of the network. In this direction, the classical ISO/OSI layered approach for communications should be reconsidered in order to include the mobility of the devices among the network control primitives, as well as evolution and optimization.
In fact, in WNR some or all of the devices are expected to have memory and reasoning capabilities, which allow them to use the input coming from other devices, the environment and their history to select the best behaviour to assume according to mission objectives. Therefore, machine learning and cognitive networks concepts and algorithms would greatly contribute to WNR theory and algorithms.
This special issue aims to bring together state-of-the-art contributions on the theory,
algorithms and applications of wireless networked robotics. Original, unpublished contributions are solicited in all aspects of this discipline.