Dear Colleagues,

During the last decades, a considerable amount of research has been focused on the design and control of multi-robot systems, improving our everyday lives owing to their adaptability and multi-functionality. Critical missions with strict specifications in terms of accuracy, dexterity, and speed of completion are almost impossible to be fulfilled by the deployment of a single robot. Moreover, the risk of mission failure in a standalone approach is significantly high due to possible critical sensor or actuation faults. Instead, the deployment of multiple robots may significantly speed up the task completion, improve the perception, and strengthen the fault tolerance capabilities of the overall system. Unfortunately, however, the centralized approach to multi-robot operation, in which a single unit has access to every robot’s local information and issues commands to them, is not robust to faults and does not scale well as the number of robots increases. Alternatively, distributed multi-robot control, which allows a group of robots subject to potentially limited sensing and communication capabilities to achieve global tasks without the intervention of a central controller or access to global information, has been rapidly advancing, proving its true potential through various applications. Examples of such applications can be found in multi-robot surveillance, planetary exploration, search and rescue missions, service robots in smart homes and offices, warehouse management, transportation, etc.

This Special Issue aims at boosting multi-robot systems research and seeks articles that focus on the state-of-the-art research in all aspects of multi-robot systems. While work based on real robots is preferable, we will also accept work based on simulation only. The topics of interest for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• Distributed coordination and cooperation in multi-robot systems;
• Distributed cooperative perception;
• Distributed control and planning;
• Machine learning in multi-robot systems;
• Mapping, localization, and navigation in multi-robot systems;
• Physical interaction in/with multi-robot systems.

Dr. Charalampos P. Bechlioulis
Dr. Panagiotis Vlantis
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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