Dear Colleagues,
It is our pleasure to announce that a special issue in the IFAC Journal of Systems and Control entitled “Ecologically-Inspired Design and Control of Robotic Swarms” is calling for your contributions from now until November 15, 2023. Please see the relevant information below, and please reach out to me or the co-guest editors if you require any additional information.
Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/ifac-journal-of-systems-and-control/about/call-for-papers#ecologically-inspired-design-and-control-of-robotic-swarms
Contributed papers must be submitted via the IFAC Journal of Systems and Control online submission system (Editorial Manager®). Please select the article type “VSI: Robotic Swarms” when submitting the manuscript online.
Submission Deadline: November 15, 2023
Summary:
Ecologically-inspired control has emerged as an exciting topic within systems and controls, where individual agents and entire systems are designed based on the constraints imposed by their operating environment. This approach has the potential to revolutionize autonomous systems by enabling them to better adapt to changing environments and interact seamlessly with an unknown number of agents. The proposed special issue will cover a broad range of topics in ecologically-inspired robotics, ranging from theoretical foundations and computational approaches to experimental validation.
While constraint-based approaches, such as convex optimization control policies, have been around for some time, ecologically-inspired robotics has recently emerged as a new data-driven approach to controlling a large number of agents in an unknown environment for long-duration autonomy tasks. Under this framework, agent interactions, tasks, and safety requirements are embedded as constraints in an optimization problem where each agent minimizes its energy consumption. Furthermore, the design of an ecologically-inspired controller is closely tied to the physical interactions between agents, and this means that the resulting control policies are physically intuitive with interpretable agent behavior. The applications of ecologically-inspired robotics is broad, ranging from remote monitoring to task assignment to smart cities.
With this special issue, we aim to explore the emerging area of ecologically-inspired robotics in multi-agent and swarm systems, including the following topics:
- Design and fabrication of agents for multi-agent/swarm control
- Theoretical foundations of ecologically-inspired control
- Computational approaches to robot swarm simulation
- Advances in algorithms for ecologically-inspired control
- Novel applications and case studies for ecologically-inspired control
- The effect of physical coupling and interactions in swarm robotic systems
Guest Editors:
Dr. Logan Beaver (Executive Guest Editor)
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, United States of America, Email: lbeaver@odu.edu
Dr. Gennaro Notomista
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, Email: gennaro.notomista@uwaterloo.ca
Dr. Riku Funada
Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, Email: funada@sc.e.titech.ac.jp
Dr. Junya Yamauchi
The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, Email: junya_yamauchi@ipc.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp
