Distributed, Ubiquitous and Multi-Agent Robotic Architectures

Dear Colleagues,

Our society’s future is tightly knit to robotics and the upcoming advanced technologies that will heavily rely on new and optimized robotic architectures. The presence of robots and automation in high-end fields, including military and space, have shown the effectiveness and usefulness of such systems, and, more importantly, it encouraged researchers to broaden the application of robotics to other fields, including agriculture, forestry, mining, marine exploration, search and rescue, etc. In fact, the advancements achieved in areas from sensing to computing technologies, from machine vision to high performance embedded systems have laid the foundation for robots to integrate state-of-the-art algorithms and technologies to solve daily problems. In that sense, as robots become more ubiquitously present in our daily lives, interaction and collaboration between multiple robots performing distributed tasks, becomes not only a form of approaching the problem, but a requirement for making more effective use of those robots. That is, while several characteristics of distributed robotic contribute to better perform under a specific task, some characteristics are now required to more effectively collaborate among inherently ubiquitous robots.

In this Special Issue, we seek new and enhanced approaches to solving real-world problems using distributed and ubiquitous robotic architectures. We will focus on research to advance the current and state-of-the-art in algorithms for navigation and control of distributed robots; new architectural and/or mechanical designs; improved software architectures; sensing devices; communication solutions for multi-agent architectures; and any other approaches for enhanced distributed robotic. In summary, the research topics sought in this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the use of distributed and ubiquitous robots in:

• Navigation, motion control and task planning of robots in distributed framework;
• Distributed/decentralized SLAM algorithms;
• Distributed vision/sensing system;
• Fault-tolerance and redundancy;
• Collaborative Robotics;
• Etc.

and in terms of applications:

• Precision Agriculture: phenotyping, seeding, harvesting, environment monitoring and sensing in controlled environment or in the field;
• Transportation, management and delivery of consumer;
• Etc.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Robotics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• distributed robotic architecture
• decentralized multi-agent system
• field robotics
• vision-guided robotics
• machine vision and artificial intelligence (AI)
• navigation
• simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)
• navigation, motion control and task planning