Networked vehicle systems: From vision to reality

Networked vehicle systems are composed of nodes possessing distinct physical and computational capabilities and interact with each other over a time-varying communications topology. The resulting dynamic structure delivers novel system-level properties that can not be found in the constituent nodes. In this paper we document a series of technological achievements which allowed the concretization of resilient, flexible and very capable networks of heterogeneous vehicles that can adapt to environment conditions and collaborate in order to attain user-provided objectives safely and robustly. We also report results from several field deployments where these approaches have been successfully applied for biology, oceanography and military purposes.