Multi-Robot Systems: From Swarms to Intelligent Automata

This proceedings volume documents developments in multi-robot systems research. It is the result of a workshop on Multi-Robot Systems that was held in March 2002 at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. This workshop was held as part of the NATO working group IST-032/RTG-014 on Multi-Robot Systems and preceded this group's formal meeting. The workshop brought together researchers working in areas relevant to designing teams of autonomous vehicles, including robots and unmanned ground, air, surface, and undersea vehicles. The workshop focused on the challenging issues of team architectures, vehicle learning and adaptation, heterogeneous group control and cooperation, task selection, dynamic autonomy, mixed initiative, and human and robot team interaction. A broad range of applications of this technology are presented in this volume, including UCAVS (Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles), micro-air vehicles, UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles), UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicles), planetary exploration, assembly in space, clean-up, and urban search and rescue.This proceedings volume represents the contributions of the top researchers in this field and serves as a valuable tool for professionals in this interdisciplinary field.