The goal of this annual symposium, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, and Technical Co-Sponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society, organized in cooperation with the Center for Complex Automated Systems (CASY) of the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemi (DEIS) of the University of Bologna, is to explore and encourage research that would support the development of intelligent networks consisting of many autonomous agents, including UAV's, UGV's, or AUV's, interacting with the physical world in a distributed but coordinated fashion, and also to explore applications of such systems for defense, security, industrial control, environmental monitoring, and planetary exploration. As in the first symposium held last year at UCLA, this symposium will explore technological advances in a number of disciplines that would support such a vision; these include communications systems, collaborative robotic systems, battlefield networks, and neuro-biological systems. A major goal is to foster collaboration, on an international scale, through the identification of common models, tools and methodologies and of opportunities for collaboration among engineers and scientists working on related problems with different perspectives.

Symposium topics will include:

• Self-configuring agent-based wireless networks
• Collaborative robotic systems, large robotic “swarms”
• Hierarchical systems and dynamic system re-organization
• Systems informed by advances in neuro-biological networks
• Distributed sensing and control networks
• Cooperative behavior in natural and artificial systems
• Software architecture for large-scale systems
• Simulation of large scale distributed systems
• Experimental platforms for the study of autonomous agents
• Security in distributed systems
• Fault tolerant distributed agent networks
• Resource management in autonomous systems