Multi-Robot Coordination

Ground, aerial and marine robots have been progressively introduced in several use-cases, from industry 4.0 to smart cities and precision agriculture. Thanks to the embedded circuitry, mobile robots can serve as mobile sensors/actuators, replacing or complementing static infrastructures. In addition, their computational power enables the data processing on the edge and/or the dynamic offloading of computational tasks towards/from a remote cloud. The frontier of research envisages the deployment of highly autonomic and integrated scenarios where heterogeneous ground, aerial and/or marine robots coordinate each other and with the existing sensing and processing infrastructures to accomplish complex tasks. On the one side, this implies proposing and investigating novel M2M solutions and network protocols to enable the data communication on the aerial and ground segments while taking into account the novel possibilities offered by the emerging technologies (e.g., 5G/6G and LEO satellite communications). The communication technologies must be paired with proper control mobility functions to support swarm operations and to instill coordinated behaviors. On the other side, the data processing on the mobile edges may take advantage of emerging federated and embedded AI techniques to drastically reduce the latency of the decision process while limiting the amount of data transferred from the robotic networks.

WiSARN aims at bringing together scientific communities that share this particular research agenda to discuss state-of-the-art contributions on the design, specification, and evaluation of architectures, algorithms, applications, and protocols for current and future applications of wireless ground, marine and aerial robotic networks. Original, unpublished contributions are solicited in design, development and evaluation of wireless ground, marine and aerial robotic networks.