Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Robot communication and coordination
Venue: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 318 (2007)

ROBOCOMM is the First International Conference on Robot Communication and Coordination. As the name suggests, it aims at the convergence of two fields, acting as a common forum for the Robotics and Communications research communities. The expected outcome of the event is the cross-fertilization of these two areas leading to growth in the capabilities of both. Robotics is an interdisciplinary field that requires a number of competencies including mechanics, control theory, electronics and communications. Initially the first three areas dominated in their roles. However, in the last two decades we have witnessed the unprecedented growth of wireless communication technologies, with increasing attention given to sensor networks and ad-hoc networks, enlarging the possible configurations of a network. Meanwhile, building more than just one or two robots at a time has become cheaper and more common, thus opening a whole new range of applications for multi-robot systems with networking capabilities. Network robotics offers a framework to study coordination mechanisms for complex systems through communication channels, thus providing a natural common ground for the convergence of information processing, communication theory and control theory. Networked robotics poses significant challenges, requiring the integration of communication theory, software engineering, distributed sensing and control into a common framework. Furthermore, robots are unique in that their motion and tasking control systems are co-located with the communications mechanisms. This allows the co-exploitation of individual subsystems to provide completely new kinds of networked or distributed autonomy. ROBOCOMM aims to be the leading-edge conference where prominent researchers with different backgrounds will gather and merge different ideas into a common framework that will enable new applications based on large scale networks of mobile robots. This first conference attracted some 90 submissions, of which 42 have been selected for full paper presentation and a further 24 for poster presentation. The selection relied on the efforts of four technical program chairs leading a strong technical program committee which reviewed all papers. The high standard of reviewing and the diverse set of submissions have created a program of excellent contributions that cover the broad scope of this new convergent research field. The program includes nine sessions focused on Mobility for Communications; Localization and Tracking; Decentralized Coordination; Control Architectures; Networked Sensing; Reconfigurable Networks; Decentralized Decision Making; Applications and Devices, and Tools and Simulators. We are delighted also to have keynote talks from Prof Raffaello D'Andrea, Professor of Automatic Control at ETH Zurich and Dr Gerard McKee, head of the Active Robotics Laboratory, Reading University, UK. These keynotes will both focus on networked robots, in automated order fulfillment (a 'killer application') and in space robotics, respectively.