Multi-Robot Systems. From Swarms to Intelligent Automata. Vol.III

The Third International Workshop on Multi-Robot Systems was held in March 2005 at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., USA. Bringing together leading researchers and government sponsors for three days of technical interchange on multi-robot systems, the workshop follows two previous highly successful gatherings in 2002 and 2003. Like the previous two workshops, the meeting began with presentations by various government program managers describing application areas and programs with an interest in multi-robot systems. U.S. Government representatives were on hand from the Office of Naval Research and several other governmental offices. Top researchers in the field then presented their current activities in many areas of multi-robot systems. Presentations spanned a wide range of topics, including task allocation, coordination in dynamic environments, information/sensor sharing and fusion, distributed mapping and coverage, motion planning and control, human-robot interaction, and applications of multi-robot systems. All presentations were given in a single-track workshop format. This proceedings documents the work presented at the workshop. The research presentations were followed by panel discussions, in which all participants interacted to highlight the challenges of this field and to develop possible solutions. In addition to the invited research talks, researchers and students were given an opportunity to present their work at poster sessions. We would like to thank the Naval Research Laboratory for sponsoring this workshop and providing the facilities for these meetings to take place. We are extremely grateful to Magdalena Bugajska, Paul Wiegand, and Mitchell A. Potter, for their vital help (and long hours) in editing these proceedings and to Michelle Caccivio for providing the administrative support to the workshop.