IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Networked Robots

Networked mobile robots will have far reaching technological impact. It
is envisioned that groups of autonomous robots will collaborate using
wireless radios to allow large-scale sensing for environmental
monitoring, reconnaissance and surveillance. They will also provide
on-demand communication infrastructure for search and rescue and other
emergency response operations. A key challenge in realizing these
systems is maintaining network-wide communication as robots constantly
gain and lose links while moving. Further, the changing network

UbiRob2010 Workshop - Ubiquitous Robotics 2010.

Workshop Home Page

This workshop will bring together researchers in all areas of pursuit/evasion and search. This
includes (but is not limited to) geometric approaches, probabilistic
optimization, graph theoretic search, decision theoretic planning, and
adversarial search.

Robotics and Automation Magazine has a Youtube video channel. You can send your videos to: videos@ram.ieee-ras.org and include them in your networked-robots blog posts.

The traditional approach to provide network connectivity is to deploy a network of stationary wireless routers which cover the entire area of interest. We can use the mobility and communication capabilities of mobile robots to provide appealing solutions where stationary networks might be costly if not infeasible.

This is my master thesis, and it is a module under the EU sponsored
reconfigurable modular robotics research project called SYMBRION [www.symbrion.eu]. The project was developed at the IPR [Institute for Process control and Robotics], Universität Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany. The main goal of the SYMBRION project is to develop robots that are capable of operating as a large swarm of robots
as well as building large organisms, by connecting individual robots together, for investigating and developing
novel principles of evolution and adaptation for symbiotic organisms.

http://pacman.elstonj.com

Based on the classic video game, Roomba Pac-Man was built in a quick three weeks by myself, Jack Elston, and Cory Dixon.

Our technical committee now has a group on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2444696
All members of our community are welcome to join.

Although Networked Robots were formally represented in only two sessions at the recent IROS conference in St. Louis, a large body of work in the conference (more than 45 papers) related more or less strongly to our field. This is a non-comprehensive overview over larger thrusts, new directions and novel ideas presented at the conference.