Publications related to Artificial life

Challenges and approaches in bridging the biomimicry gap in biohybrid systems of fish and robots

As the field of ethology advances, especially over the past two decades, the role of animal-robot interaction tools has increasingly become essential. This importance arises from the need for controlled, repetitive, repeatable, and long-duration experiment ...

EPFL2023

Playing Brains: The Ethical Challenges Posed by Silicon Sentience and Hybrid Intelligence in DishBrain

The convergence of human and artificial intelligence is currently receiving considerable scholarly attention. Much debate about the resulting Hybrid Minds focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence into the human brain through intelligent brain- ...

2023

DyNCA: Real-time Dynamic Texture Synthesis Using Neural Cellular Automata

Sabine Süsstrunk, Ehsan Pajouheshgar, Yitao Xu, Tong Zhang

Current Dynamic Texture Synthesis (DyTS) models can synthesize realistic videos. However, they require a slow iterative optimization process to synthesize a single fixed-size short video, and they do not offer any post-training control over the synthesis p ...

Ieee Computer Soc2023

A biohybrid interaction framework for the integration of robots in animal societies

Francesco Mondada, Daniel Burnier, Vaios Papaspyros, Raphael Cherfan

The collective behavior of animals has been traditionally studied through observation, quantitative models of behavior, and devices of low intelligence. Nowadays, the advancements in the field of robotics allow for closed-loop experiments that occur in rea ...

2023

Bio-Hybrid Systems for Ecosystem Level Effects

Francesco Mondada, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Matthieu Jean-Michel Philippe Broisin, Martina Szopek, Jean-Louis Deneubourg

In a time marked by ecological decay and by the perspective of a severe backlash of this ecosystem decay and climate devastation onto human society, bold moves that employ novel technology to counteract this decline are required. We present a novel concept ...

MIT Press2021

Evo-Bots: A Simple, Stochastic Approach to Self-assembling Artificial Organisms

Francesco Mondada, Roderich Gross

This paper describes an alternative path towards artificial life-one by which simple modular robots with novel hybrid motion control are used to represent artificial organisms. We outline conceptually how such a system would work, and present a partial har ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2019

Large‐Range HS‐AFM Imaging of DNA Self‐Assembly through In Situ Data‐Driven Control

Alireza Karimi, Georg Fantner, Maartje Martina Cornelia Bastings, Adrian Pascal Nievergelt, Christoph Manuel Kammer, Eva Eugene Kurisinkal, Charlène Cécile Geneviève Brillard

Understanding hierarchical self-assembly of biological structures requires real time measurement of the self-assembly process over a broad range of length- and timescales. The success of high-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) in imaging small scale mo ...

2019

Design of Low-Profile Compliant Transmission Mechanisms

Jamie Paik, Zhenishbek Zhakypov, Frédéric Henri Vaskin Giraud

Robotic origami design allows creating meso-scale robotic systems and mechanisms not limited by degrees of freedom, miniaturization and assembly downsides of conventional transmission mechanisms. However, unlike the traditional rigid approaches, robotic or ...

IEEE2019

Lightweight physics-based models for the control of fluid-mediated self-assembly of robotic modules

Alcherio Martinoli, Hala Khodr, Bahar Haghighat

Self-assembling robotic systems form a subclass of distributed robotic systems that undertake the fundamental task of structure formation. These systems build desired target structures by putting their constituting robotic modules together in a distributed ...

Elsevier2019

The Scientific Case for Brain Simulations

Felix Schürmann, Michele Migliore, Alain Destexhe

A key element of the European Union's Human Brain Project (HBP) and other large-scale brain research projects is the simulation of large-scale model networks of neurons. Here, we argue why such simulations will likely be indispensable for bridging the scal ...

CELL PRESS2019

Shape constrained splines as transparent black-box models for bioprocess modeling

Dominique Bonvin, Julien Léo Billeter, Sriniketh Srinivasan

Empirical model identification for biological systems is a challenging task due to the combined effects of complex interactions, nonlinear effects, and lack of specific measurements. In this context, several researchers have provided tools for experimental ...

Elsevier2017

Unravelling socio-motor biomarkers in schizophrenia

Aude Billard, Mahdi Khoramshahi, Laura Bénédicte Marine Cohen

We present novel, low-cost and non-invasive potential diagnostic biomarkers of schizophrenia. They are based on the 'mirrorgame', a coordination task in which two partners are asked to mimic each other's hand movements. In particular, we use the patient's ...

2017

Adaptive Morphology: A Design Principle for Multimodal and Multifunctional Robots

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev

Morphology plays an important role in behavioral and locomotion strategies of living and artificial systems. There is biological evidence that adaptive morphological changes can not only extend dynamic performances by reducing tradeoffs during locomotion b ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2016

Learning Search Strategies from Human Demonstrations

Guillaume Pierre Luc De Chambrier

Decision making and planning with partial state information is a problem faced by all forms of intelligent entities. The formulation of a problem under partial state information leads to an exorbitant set of choices with associated probabilistic outcomes m ...

EPFL2016

Morphological Evolution of Physical Robots through Model-Free Phenotype Development

Simon Lukas Hauser

Artificial evolution of physical systems is a stochastic optimization method in which physical machines are iteratively adapted to a target function. The key for a meaningful design optimization is the capability to build variations of physical machines th ...

2015

Institutional Robotics Institutions for Social Robots

José Nuno Ferreira Maia Pereira

The way human beings engage with material things in our environment is experiencing rapid modification. Human and non-human, natural and artificial creatures are on the verge of building unprecedented relations of sociability. This paper takes this process ...

Springer2015

The Cognitive Correlates of Anthropomorphism

Pierre Dillenbourg, Séverin Lemaignan, Julia Fink

While anthropomorphism in human-robot interaction is often discussed, it still appears to lack formal grounds. We recently proposed a first model of the dynamics of anthropomorphism that reflects the evolution of anthropomorphism in the human-robot interac ...

2014

RoboGen: Robot Generation through Artificial Evolution

Dario Floreano, Ilya Loshchilov, Joshua Evan Auerbach, Andrea Maesani, Ludovic Daler, Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski, Titus Cieslewski, Grégoire Hilaire Marie Heitz, Deniz Aydin, Pradeep Ruben Fernando

Science instructors from a wide range of disciplines agree that hands-on laboratory components of courses are pedagogically necessary (Freedman, 1997). However, certain shortcomings of current laboratory exercises have been pointed out by several authors ( ...

The MIT Press2014

Soft Cell Simulator: A tool to study Soft Multi-Cellular Robots

Dario Floreano, Andrea Maesani, Jürg Markus Germann, Manuel Stöckli

Modular or multi-cellular robots hold the promise to adapt their morphology to task and environment. However, research in modular robotics has traditionally been limited to mechanically non-adaptive systems due to hard building blocks and rigid connection ...

2013

Towards bio-hybrid systems made of social animals and robots

Francesco Mondada

For making artificial systems collaborate with group-living animals, the scientific challenge is to build artificial systems that can perceive, communicate to, interact with and adapt to animals. When such capabilities are available then it should be possi ...

Springer2013