[agents] [CFP] Special Issue/Research Topic "Mobile Cyber-Physical Collectives" on Frontiers in Robotics and AI

[Roberto Casadei]

Key information

- SI title:  Mobile Cyber-Physical Collectives
- SI venue: Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Scimago 2020 rank: Q2); 
Frontiers in Manufacturing Technology > Software Technologies; Frontiers 
in Neurorobotics
- SI web page: 
<https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/24380/mobile-cyber-physical-collectives>
- DEADLINE (abstract): 26 November 2021
- DEADLINE (submission): 25 February 2022

Visit the following to participate to the research topic/collection: 
https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/24380/mobile-cyber-physical-collectives/participate-in-open-access-research-topic

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Current trends are pushing towards a vision of computational and 
physical processes that seamlessly, continuously interact to provide 
novel kinds of services, applications, and solutions. Such tightly 
integrated processes are carried out by Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), 
namely networks of “cyber” and “physical” components engineered by 
emphasizing the three “C”s of communication, computation, and control. 
It is expected that our environments (bodies, homes, buildings, cities) 
will be increasingly filled with devices capable of situated action as 
well as decision making through their computational counterparts (cf. 
digital twins), which may be supported on-board or remotely. In many 
cases, these CPSs are able to move about their environment making them 
mobile CPS. The more devices get deployed, the more the emphasis moves 
from what an individual cyber-physical device can provide to what an 
entire collective of mobile cyber-physical devices can provide. Swarms 
of robots, crowds of augmented people, ICT infrastructures, wireless 
sensor and actuator networks, the Internet of Things (IoT), and smart 
grids, are all examples of Mobile Cyber-Physical Collectives (MCPCs), 
namely collections of mobile cyber-physical elements sharing tasks or 
aiming at global goals or “social benefits”.

While opportunities of emerging CPSs such as MCPCs arise, research is 
devoted to addressing theoretical and practical challenges inherent to 
distribution, coordination, control, and operational requirements. In 
MCPCs, the collective nature adds more challenges related to collective 
decision making, emergent behavior, and scalability, which fosters 
decentralized architectures and solutions. Additionally, given the large 
number of components involved in CPCs, heterogeneity would be 
omnipresent and an element to be considered. This brings about different 
space and time scales with which we need to deal. System-level 
adaptation to environmental change is another prominent issue to be 
addressed and studied in fields like self-organizing systems (SOSs) and 
collective adaptive systems (CASs) engineering, where natural phenomena 
and processes (cf. ant colonies, force fields, cellular systems, 
chemical reactions) are often used as inspiration for devising novel 
methods and mechanisms. Moreover, nowadays, ICT infrastructures are 
getting more complex and intensely exploited, enabling multiple 
possibilities for communication and computation across the 
edge-fog-cloud continuum; this provides alternatives for deployment of 
cyber elements and hence different guarantees and non-functional 
outcomes for communication CPSs.

To address these challenges, this Research Topic invites original, 
high-quality work presenting novel research on mobile Cyber-physical 
Systems operating as collectives. Featured articles should present novel 
strategies that address issues in different aspects of collective CPS 
such as methods, architecture, design, validation, verification, and 
application of cyber-physical collectives.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Digital twins for large-scale CPSs

• Bio-inspired distributed computing approaches

• Multi-disciplinary approaches to collective behaviour design

• Decentralised algorithms for collective decision-making

• Models and tools for heterogeneous socio-technical systems

• Architectures and patterns for CPC systems design

• Methodologies for CPC systems engineering

• Programming languages and non-conventional paradigms for collective 
systems

• Techniques for soft or hard real-time coordination of collective activity

• Organisational paradigms for multi-agent systems

• Privacy and security in cyber-physical ecosystems

• Formal methods for analysis and prediction of emergent collective 
behaviour

• Verification and validation approaches for cyber-physical CAS 
(collective adaptive systems)

• Soft computing approaches to collective systems

• Mobility computing approaches to CPSs

• Approaches to crowds of augmented people and smart devices

• Approaches to swarm robotics

• Approaches to CI (collective intelligence)

• Case studies and applications involving CPCs (e.g., in context like 
smart cities, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, security, 
healthcare)

Topic editors

- Lukas Esterle, Aarhus University
- Roberto Casadei, Alma Mater Studiorum-Università di Bologna
- Rose Gamble, University of Tulsa
- Paul Harvey, Rakuten Mobile
- Elizabeth F. Wanner, Aston University