It is clear that wireless technology, or in a broader sense communication technology, is everywhere; it is around us. In this context, it really makes sense to take advantage of such technologies in order to improve or to solve some of the challenging problems associated with autonomous mobile robots.

Communication technologies constitute a key element in multi-robot systems. This means that the software controlling a team of robots should care about the exchange of information among robots and their surrounding environment. This issue is especially extreme when it is required to perform various tasks with different requirements and constraints in an optimal way. All those challenging concerns are covered in the first subsection of this book. Illustrative applications go from wheeled robots to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The suitability of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology is also demonstrated here.

The second part of the book is devoted to data fusion and its application to the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. Wireless sensor networks or robotic clusters demonstrate their efficiency in order to parallelize the computationally demanding properties of SLAM. Cooperative localization of a team of robots is also performed with the method signals of opportunity (SOOP).

Security and dependability constitute the scope of the third part of the book. One key element in communication technologies, for example wireless sensor networks, is the security, that is, the inclusion of defense mechanisms for avoiding and/or detecting attacks. Notice that this fundamental point is usually not found in robotics studies, which makes it especially welcome in this book. The flexibility of the technology wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is demonstrated in industrial applications.

The book concludes with a two-chapter section called “Mobility.” This part is focused on how to manage several sources of information from a software point of view. Applications include automobiles (automatic merge control) and mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSN).

In a nutshell, this is a recommended reference for someone who wants to know the ropes of the cutting-edge research in robotics with a special emphasis in the interaction of robots with the environment through wireless technologies.