About this Research Topic
Biological systems such as ant colonies, flocks of birds, and herds of sheep display emergent behaviors that are of great interest to swarm robotics research. Recent research in scalable and efficient self-organized robot swarms and collaborative behaviors demonstrates the vital role that biological swarms play in inspiring robotics research. This has numerous real-world applications, such as humanitarian de-mining, search and rescue (SAR) operations, agricultural harvesting, infrastructure inspection, and planetary exploration.
While many robotics works focus on single-type robot systems for their simplicity and homogeneity, heterogeneous robot systems are emerging as effective solutions for multi-robot tasks. For instance, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with better sensing and extended vision can complement robot swarms consisting of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) or unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), and collaboration with UAVs can improve the performance of robot swarms significantly. However, such systems present new challenges, including the need for a more sophisticated architecture for coordinating heterogeneous robots, an efficient communication network for a large swarm, a more resilient robot learning for different robots, and the ability to scale the swarm to a large group while maintaining efficient performance.
Heterogeneity in robot swarms can arise from physical or behavioral differences, such as (i) robots with different designs and roles; (ii) robots with different designs but the same roles, or (iii) robots with the same design but different roles in a cooperating team. This topic focuses on the implementation of heterogeneous multi-robot systems and robot swarms. We welcome articles that describe mature research demonstrated on physical systems or theoretical work that has a clear and direct application to robots.
Some potential topics for this area of research include, but are not limited to:
* Heterogeneous robot swarms are applied to tasks such as foraging, search and rescue, assembly, construction, agriculture, inspection, monitoring, or space exploration.
* Heterogeneity in learning for multi-robot systems.
* Heterogeneous cooperative dexterous manipulators.
* Heterogeneous cooperative sensing for robots.
* Heterogeneous cooperative localization and mapping.
* Coordination and collaboration of multiple heterogeneous robots.
* Heterogeneous strategies for multi-robot communication networks.
* Heterogeneous robot swarms in adversarial domains.
* Heterogeneous robot swarms in centralized or decentralized learning.
* Heterogeneous bio-inspired robot swarms.
* Heterogeneous self-organizing robot swarms.
While many robotics works focus on single-type robot systems for their simplicity and homogeneity, heterogeneous robot systems are emerging as effective solutions for multi-robot tasks. For instance, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with better sensing and extended vision can complement robot swarms consisting of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) or unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), and collaboration with UAVs can improve the performance of robot swarms significantly. However, such systems present new challenges, including the need for a more sophisticated architecture for coordinating heterogeneous robots, an efficient communication network for a large swarm, a more resilient robot learning for different robots, and the ability to scale the swarm to a large group while maintaining efficient performance.
Heterogeneity in robot swarms can arise from physical or behavioral differences, such as (i) robots with different designs and roles; (ii) robots with different designs but the same roles, or (iii) robots with the same design but different roles in a cooperating team. This topic focuses on the implementation of heterogeneous multi-robot systems and robot swarms. We welcome articles that describe mature research demonstrated on physical systems or theoretical work that has a clear and direct application to robots.
Some potential topics for this area of research include, but are not limited to:
* Heterogeneous robot swarms are applied to tasks such as foraging, search and rescue, assembly, construction, agriculture, inspection, monitoring, or space exploration.
* Heterogeneity in learning for multi-robot systems.
* Heterogeneous cooperative dexterous manipulators.
* Heterogeneous cooperative sensing for robots.
* Heterogeneous cooperative localization and mapping.
* Coordination and collaboration of multiple heterogeneous robots.
* Heterogeneous strategies for multi-robot communication networks.
* Heterogeneous robot swarms in adversarial domains.
* Heterogeneous robot swarms in centralized or decentralized learning.
* Heterogeneous bio-inspired robot swarms.
* Heterogeneous self-organizing robot swarms.
Keywords: Heterogeneous Robots, Swarm Robotics
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
