Product Description: An agent is a system capable of perceiving the environment, reasoning with the percepts and then acting upon the world. Agents can be purely software systems, in which case their percepts and output `actions' are encoded binary strings...read more

Robots in groups or colonies can exhibit an enormous variety and richness of behaviors which cannot be observed with singly autonomous systems. Of course, this is analogous to the amazing variety of group animal behaviors which can be observed in nature. In recent years more and more investigators have started to study these behaviors. The studies range from classifications and taxonomies of behaviors, to development of architectures which cause such group activities as flocking or swarming, and from emphasis on the role of intelligent agents in such groups to studies of learning and obstacle avoidance. There used to be a time when many robotics researchers would question those who were interested in working with teams of robots: `Why are you worried about robotic teams when it's hard enough to just get one to work?'. This issue responds to that question. Robot Colonies provides a new approach to task problem-solving that is similar in many ways to distributed computing. Multiagent robotic teams offer the possibility of spatially distributed parallel and concurrent perception and action. A paradigm shift results when using multiple robots, providing a different perspective on how to carry out complex tasks. New issues such as interagent communications, spatial task distribution, heterogeneous or homogeneous societies, and interference management are now central to achieving coordinated and productive activity within a colony. Fortunately mobile robot hardware has evolved sufficiently in terms of both cost and robustness to enable these issues to be studied on actual robots and not merely in simulation. Robot Colonies presents a sampling of the research in this field. While capturing a reasonable representation of the most important work within this area, its objective is not to be a comprehensive survey, but rather to stimulate new research by exposing readers to the principles of robot group behaviors, architectures and theories. Robot Colonies is an edited volume of peer-reviewed original research comprising eight invited contributions by leading researchers. This research work has also been published as a special issue of Autonomous Robots (Volume 4, Number 1).

All life came from sea but all robots were born on land. The vast majority of both industrial and mobile robots operate on land, since the technology to allow them to operate in and under the ocean has only become available in recent years. A number of complex issues due to the unstructured, hazardous undersea environment, makes it difficult to travel in the ocean while today's technologies allow humans to land on the moon and robots to travel to Mars . . Clearly, the obstacles to allowing robots to operate in a saline, aqueous, and pressurized environment are formidable. Mobile robots operating on land work under nearly constant atmospheric pressure; their legs (or wheels or tracks) can operate on a firm footing; their bearings are not subjected to moisture and corrosion; they can use simple visual sensing and be observed by their creators working in simple environments. In contrast, consider the environment where undersea robots must operate. The pressure they are subjected to can be enormous, thus requiring extremely rugged designs. The deep oceans range between 19,000 to 36,000 ft. At a mere 33-foot depth, the pressure will be twice the normal one atmosphere pressure of 29. 4 psi. The chemical environment of the sea is highly corrosive, thus requiring the use of special materials. Lubrication of moving parts in water is also difficult, and may require special sealed, waterproof joints.