Publications related to Ant robotics

Quantifying the biomimicry gap in biohybrid robot-fish pairs

Biohybrid systems in which robotic lures interact with animals have become compelling tools for probing and identifying the mechanisms underlying collective animal behavior. One key challenge lies in the transfer of social interaction models from simulatio ...

2024

Gas Sensing with Rotary-Wing Nano Aerial Vehicles

Chiara Ercolani

Harmful chemical compounds are released daily in warehouses, chemical plants and during environmental emergencies. Their uncontrolled dispersion contributes to the pollution of the atmosphere and threatens human and animal lives. When gas leaks occur, the ...

EPFL2024

Exact Obstacle Avoidance for Robots in Complex and Dynamic Environments Using Local Modulation

Lukas Huber

Robots outside of the fenced factories have to deal with continuously changing environment, this requires fast and flexible modes of control. Planning methods or complex learning models can find optimal paths in complex surroundings, but they are computati ...

EPFL2024

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction: An Explorative Path to Foster Complex Systems Understanding

Hala Khodr

Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...

EPFL2023

Certification of Bottleneck Task Assignment With Shortest Path Criteria

Maryam Kamgarpour, Tony Alan Wood

Minimising the longest travel distance for a group of mobile robots with interchangeable goals requires knowledge of the shortest length paths between all robots and goal destinations. Determining the exact length of the shortest paths in an environment wi ...

2023

Hybrid Flock - Formation Control Algorithms

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann, Jonas Perolini, Emna Tourki

Two prominent categories for achieving coordinated multirobot displacement are flocking and navigation in formation. Both categories have their own body of literature and characteristics, including their respective advantages and disadvantages. While typic ...

Springer Nature Switzerland2022

Tales from a Robotic World. How Intelligent Machines Will Shape Our Future

Dario Floreano, Nicola Nosengo

Stories from the future of intelligent machines—from rescue drones to robot spouses—and accounts of cutting-edge research that could make it all possible. Tech prognosticators promised us robots—autonomous humanoids that could carry out any number of tasks ...

MIT Press2022

Navigation of Concentric Tube Continuum Robots using Optimal Control

John Maddocks, Siva Prasad Chakri Dhanakoti

Recently developed Concentric Tube Continuum Robots (CTCRs) are widely exploited in, for example in minimally invasive surgeries which involve navigating inside narrow body cavities close to sensitive regions. These CTCRs can be controlled by extending and ...

SCITEPRESS2022

VIO-UWB-Based Collaborative Localization and Dense Scene Reconstruction within Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems

Fabrizio Schiano

Effective collaboration in multi-robot systems requires accurate and robust estimation of relative localization: from cooperative manipulation to collaborative sensing, and including cooperative exploration or cooperative transportation. This paper introdu ...

IEEE2022

Deep Learning Approaches for Auditory Perception in Robotics

Weipeng He

Auditory perception is an essential part of a robotic system in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and creating an artificial auditory perception system that is on par with human has been a long-standing goal for researchers. In fact, this is a challenging res ...

EPFL2021

Development and control of interactive reconfigurable robotic systems

Jian-Lin Huang

While reconfigurable robots provide a new promising approach for interactive systems, the complexity of distributed actuation/sensing systems, coupled kinematics and desired functionalities also bring new challenges and questions both in control design and ...

EPFL2021

Exploring Spatial Perspective Taking in Human-Robot Interaction

Elmira Yadollahi

Humans often rely on their perspective taking skills to thrive within the world's complex relations and connections. An adequate understanding of others' spatial perspectives can increase the quality of the interaction, not only perceptually but also cogni ...

EPFL2021

Flocking-enhanced social contagion

Ignacio Pagonabarraga Mora

Populations of mobile agents-animal groups, robot swarms, or crowds of people-self-organize into a large diversity of states as a result of information exchanges with their surroundings. While in many situations of interest the motion of the agents is driv ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2020

Robot swarms as an educational tool: The Thymio’s way

Francesco Mondada

Robotics provides useful tools for educational purposes, allowing to engage students in learning within disparate domains, from computer science and artificial intelligence – traditionally the main domains for educational robotics – to general education, h ...

2019

Modular Reconfigurable Robotics

Jamie Paik

This article reviews the current state of the art in the development of modular reconfigurable robot (MRR) systems and suggests promising future research directions. A wide variety of MRR systems have been presented to date, and these robots promise to be ...

ANNUAL REVIEWS2019

Cellulo: Tangible Haptic Swarm Robots for Learning

Ayberk Özgür

Robots are steadily becoming one of the significant 21st century learning technologies that aim to improve education within both formal and informal environments. Such robots, called Robots for Learning, have so far been utilized as constructionist tools o ...

EPFL2018

Design Methodology for Constructing Multimaterial Origami Robots and Machines

Jamie Paik, Zhenishbek Zhakypov

Robotic origami allows rapid prototyping of intelligent robots and machines constructed from thin sheets of functional materials. Multimaterial-based design freedom of origami robots creates functional versatility; however, the design parameters pose chall ...

2018

Workshop on Robots for Learning: R4L

Pierre Dillenbourg, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Ana Paiva

While robots have been popular as a tool for STEM teaching, the use of robots in other learning scenarios is novel. The field of HRI has started to report on how to make effective robots usable in educational contexts. However, many challenges remain. For ...

ACM2017

Cellulo: Versatile Handheld Robots for Education

Pierre Dillenbourg, Francesco Mondada, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Léa Marie Pereyre, Ayberk Özgür, Séverin Lemaignan, Manon Aline Briod, Maria Maria Beltran Reyes

In this article, we present Cellulo, a novel robotic platform that investigates the intersection of three ideas for robotics in education: designing the robots to be versatile and generic tools; blending robots into the classroom by designing them to be pe ...

ACM2017

On Combining Multi-robot Coverage and Reciprocal Collision Avoidance

Alcherio Martinoli, Andreas Breitenmoser

Although robotic coverage and collision avoidance are active areas of robotics research, the avoidance of collision situations between robots has often been neglected in the context of multi-robot coverage tasks. In fact, for robots of physical size, colli ...

Springer Japan2016