This site has the purpose of providing the people interested in robotics and network robotics a fast moderated discussion forum on the applications and theoretical issues rised by the development and deployment of distributed networked multirobot systems.

If you have any suggestion or wish to volunteer ...research@heronrobots.com

Networked robotics is a new and growing area of research integrating robotics, networking, multimedia and component-based software technologies in support of local, remote, distributed, cooperative and multi-robot system architectures and operations.
Networked robotics constitues a new conceptual framework in which to explore and extend traditional problems in robotics, while creating important new robotics applications.
A paradigm shift (in the T.Kuhn sense) is emerging: from designing an architecture that integrates sensors and actuators within a single physical platform under centralized control to one in which robotic sensors, actuators, computing, and human interfaces are distributed across multiple physical robot platforms, possibly in time-delayed and/or asynchronous communications.
There are several important research project in this field, some of the most important are: the Korean KIST URC project, US DARPA MARS Vision 2020, Japan Network Robot Forum. Close in concept are the US ARMY FCS initiative and the DARPA Coabs project (which has some similarities at least at ‘marketing’ level with what we are proposing, although we a less clean and structured approach). The URC and the Network Robot Forum motivation are clearly showing, on top the scientifical challenges the economical relevance of the network robotics field. This project in particular looks like an extention to robotics of the thin-client concept of internet computing: ‘the network is the robot’. Network Robot Forum estimates the networked robot industry to grow to 19.8 trillion (>130 G€) by 2013. KIST hope to put a ‘network robot’ in any Korean household (100% penetration!) by year 2010 (actually S.Korea has a strong high bandwidth internet penetration.
Although it is usually difficult to predict the future, we can expect some movement in the field :-).

Heron is a recently constituted privately held startup-company whose main focus is to develop and implement advanced breakthrough solutions in the fields of robotics and of intelligent autonomous systems.