This site has the purpose of providing the people interested in robotics, network robotics and grid technology a fast moderated discussion forum on the applications of grid, internet computing and massively parallel distributed computing to the development and deployment of highly distributed swarmoid networked multirobot systems.

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From a certain respect what is meant as 'grid robotics' here can be seen as a generalized grid where some of the resource managed are various kind of intelligent autonomous robotic agents. This seems to show some inherent advantages. If the computing grid, is a VO grid, or ‘the grid’ the high performance computing capabilities added to the multiplication effect in the ‘real world’ of deploying a swarm of intelligent mobile autonomous robots could apparently open a wide range of new advanced applications. Thus allowing the massive deployment of robot 'helpers' to facilitate urban and complex outdoor activities.The architecture sketched in this paper is feasible, and largely based on ‘commodity’ software environments . There are, although, limits that prevent from some extreme application. For example the smaller robotic unit should – without workarounds and with the constraint of using commodity system environment like those quoted above – be in the 10 cm scale. Moreover, a number of interfaces need to be integrated and customized.
The environment is complex and although capable of supplying high computing power it requires some resources. On the other end, the real strength of the proposed architecture is that an inherently on demand flexible and distributed grid based computing environment is coupled with a distributed sensing/actuating environment. Another advantage is the capability to allocate the computing resources to the robot units which really need them when and how they need them, Given that and considering that the physical implementation and ‘low’ level control algorithms perform in parallel as well as the robot tasks and goals and the most common computing tasks (planning for all) are of a kind that can greatly benefit from parallel execution with are best condition to fully exploit advantages of the underlying architecture. Last but not least the computing grid can be a disconnected local one, but also a big Virtual Organisation grid or even ‘the Grid’, as a consequence the deployed computing power can be quite noticeable. It becomes possible to deploy a huge number of comparatively intelligent agents.
A 'city' grid could be the computational backbone of a variety of robotized services performed by large or very large 'swarms' of mobile intelligent autonomous systems (from road cleaning to automated transport vehicles management).

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.