Introduction

This book dives into the heart of how to design distributed control architectures for heterogeneous teams of humans, robots, and automated systems, enabling them to achieve greater cooperation and autonomy through the use of network technologies. It covers a wide range of practical, proven strategies for pervasive communication and collaborative problem solving abilities of humans, robots, and their environments. Each chapter consists of a presentation of findings from the latest research in networked robots and ambient intelligence. The chapters also detail how to allow robots to achieve universal access to the extended functionality of the environment that brings various cost effective services to those in need. Readers can envision a realistic view of what can be expected from a networked human robot cooperative environment in the next decade. The multidisciplinary content of this book is a handy reference for anyone interested in the future direction of ubiquitous computing and networked robots.