Autonomous Robots - Topical Collection: Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 2024
Guest Editors:
Michael Otte, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
Kirsten Hagelskjaer Petersen, Cornell University, USA
Michael Rubenstein, Northwestern University, USA
Associate Guest Editors:
Petras Swissler, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
Tin Lun Lam, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Nils Napp, Cornell University, USA
Mark Yim, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Alexandra Nilles, Western Washington University, USA
Merihan Alhafnawi, Princeton University, USA
Bahar Haghighat, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Fei Miao, University of Connecticut, USA
Jai Pan, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Submission deadline: 1 June 2025
Description
Due to rapid advances in manufacturing, computing, and communication, distributed robotics is a rapidly growing area in robotics. This field draws on knowledge across a large range of disciplines such as computer science, communication and control systems, electrical and mechanical engineering, life sciences, and humanities.
This Topical Collection presents research articles on robot systems that are distributed and autonomous by combining elements of computer science, communication and control systems, and electrical and mechanical engineering.
Submission guidelines
All papers must be prepared in accordance with the Submission Guidelines. Articles for this Topical Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. During the submission process authors will be asked if they are submitting to a Collection, please select "Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 2024” from the dropdown menu.
Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of the topics of the Topical Collection. All submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of relevance, significance of contribution, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation, by at least two independent reviewers. It is the policy of the journal that no submission, or substantially overlapping submission, be published or be under review at another journal or conference at any time during the review process.
Please note that the authors of selected papers presented at DARS2024 are invited to submit an extended version of their contributions by taking into consideration both the reviewers’ comments on their conference paper, and the feedback received during presentation at the conference. It is worth clarifying that the extended version is expected to contain a substantial scientific contribution, e.g., in the form of new algorithms, experiments or qualitative/quantitative comparisons, and that neither verbatim transfer of large parts of the conference paper nor reproduction of already published figures will be tolerated. The extended versions of DARS2024 papers will undergo the standard, rigorous journal review process and be accepted only if well-suited to the topic of this Topical Collection and meeting the scientific level of the journal. Final decisions on all papers are made by the Editor-in-Chief.
Meet the Guest Editors:
Michael Otteis an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. His research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms, methods, and behaviors for autonomous robots and multi-agent systems. His lab is particularly interested in problems that involve motion planning, cooperation, coordination, and game theory, and application domains that involve hazards, unreliable communication, and change.
Kirsten Hagelskjaer Petersenis an Associate Professor and Aref and Manon Lahham Faculty Fellow in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University, USA. Her research interests include simple robotic solutions to complex problems, with a focus on bio-inspired design and coordination of robot collectives, as well as studies of their biological counterparts. Major research topics in her lab include swarm intelligence, embodied intelligence, autonomous construction, digital agriculture, bio-cyber physical systems, human-swarm interaction, and soft robot swarms.
Michael Rubensteinis an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering departments at Northwestern University, USA. His research interest is to advance the control and design of multi-robot systems, enabling their use instead of traditional single robots and to solve problems for which traditional robots are not suitable. Using these multi-robot systems can offer more parallelism, adaptability, and fault tolerance when compared to a traditional single robot.
Petras Swissler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA. His work focuses on developing real-world, novel robotic systems --- conceptualizing new robot mechanisms, building and design of robotic systems, and the development of algorithms that these new robots can use.
Tin Lun Lam is an Assistant Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, an Executive Deputy Director of the National-local Joint Engineering Laboratory of Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, and a Director of the Center for Intelligent Robots at Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society. His research focus includes Field Robotics, Moduar Robots, and Multi-robot Collaboration.
Nils Napp is an Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University, USA. His research is at the intersection of algorithm and robot design. He especially enjoy projects that focus on how to map mathematical insights to physical systems to allow them to perform new tasks and behaviors. His research group often draws inspiration from biology. For example, leveraging self-organization, managing noise created by many interacting components, and using distributed reactive behaviors as feedback to adapt their strategies to help robots operate in random, unstructured, and fluctuating environments.
Mark Yim is the Asa Whitney Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Department at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is also the Director of the GRASP Lab. His research spans modular self-reconfigurable robot, biologically inspired mechanisms, steerable needles, truss robots, flying robots, and microscale locomotion.
Alexandra Nilles is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Western Washington University, USA. Her research integrates motion planning, computational geometry, and dynamical systems to formalize the design and analysis of robots that have strong interactions with their environment or other agents in their environment. Her work is motivated by resource-constrained settings such as remote or underwater environmental monitoring, or micro/nano-robotics for microbiology research.
Merihan Alhafnawi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Princeton University, USA. Her research interests include designing, building, and developing algorithms for social robot swarms that empower people to express themselves, share ideas, and collaborate while enhancing their well-being. Ranging from creating robotic elements on facades to make them responsive, to creating smart robotic sticky notes for brainstorming, her robots have been used by more than 500 people.
Bahar Haghighat is an Assistant Professor in Robotics and Automation at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her research investigates building novel miniaturized robotic swarms and algorithmic frameworks that enable sensing, surveying, and inspection applications. Her work spans the fields of mechatronics, electronics, embedded systems, artificial intelligence, and distributed systems.
Fei Miao is the Pratt & Whitney Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Connecticut, USA. The broad agenda of her work is to develop the foundations for the science of Embodied AI, to assure safety, efficiency, robustness and security of the systems by integrating learning, optimization, and control. Her research interests span several technical fields, including multi-agent reinforcement learning, robust optimization, uncertainty quantification, control theory, and game theory. Application areas include connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), intelligent and sustainable transportation systems, multi-robot systems, smart cities, and power networks.
Jai Pan is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, with a focus on developing intelligent algorithms, sensors, and machines to accomplish fully autonomous robots.