ROBOCOMM

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 to promote cross-pollination of these two areas leading to growth in the capabilities of both. Robotics is an interdisciplinary field that includes the following key competencies: 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 the natural common ground for 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. Hence, ROBOCOMM will be a 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.