Networked Robotics has come a significant way since its inception in the
early 90’s in the form of online (web-based) robot systems. Its progress since that time has
been allied closely to the development of the web, the Internet and computer networking
technology, notably wireless networks. Where is networked robotics now and what does
the future hold? This chapter explores these questions from the viewpoint of research in the
Active Robotics Laboratory at the University of Reading in the UK for the period from the
early 1990s up to 2011. This research has focused on networked robotics as a distributed set
of computing and robotics resources. Previous work on online robot systems, distributed
software models and cooperative robotics is reviewed along with recent work on swarm
systems and swarm-array computing, which takes some of the ideas of networked robotics
into the field of fault tolerance for high performance computing systems.
