| Sumario: | Fast-paced developments in the fields of aerial, land, and marine robotics are steadily paving the way for a wide spectrum of scientific and commercial applications of autonomous vehicles with far-reaching societal implications. Autonomous robots equipped with advanced sensors and manipulators afford humans the capability to operate seamlessly in remote and hazardous environments, as if they were extensions of our eyes and hands. Robots have become the tools par excellence for scientists and commercial operators to explore and monitor the state of heterogenous environments on Earth, inspect offshore wave and energy infrastructures, monitor the growth of crops, and transport goods, among a myriad of other activities. Groups of robots acting in cooperation have started to impact the development of multiple system platforms for adaptive environmental sampling, search and rescue operations in hard-to-access regions, and even coordinated image-taking in the movie and sports industries. The types of robots used are highly heterogeneous and cater to specific user-defined requirements for operations in the air, on land, and at sea. Notwithstanding this diversity, they have in common a number of attributes that are key to their capability to explore or act upon the environment with great agility while exhibiting high levels of performance, resilience, adaptability, and safety.
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