Publications de Philippe Rétornaz

Bringing robotics into formal education using the Thymio open source hardware robot

Francesco Mondada, Stéphane Magnenat, Michael Bonani, Fanny Riedo, Philippe Rétornaz, Manon Aline Briod, Léa Marie Pereyre

Mobile robots are valuable tools for education because of both the enthusiasm they raise and the multidisciplinary nature of robotics technology. Mobile robots give access to a wide range of fields, such as complex mechanics, sensors, wireless transmission ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2017

Construction par procédé additif réalisée avec des robots mobiles autonomes hétérogènes

Philippe Rétornaz

This thesis lies at the crossroad of three research fields: heterogenous mobile collective robotics, autonomous construction with mobile robots and 3D printing. The main goal of this work is to implement and study an innovative way to interact and modify t ...

EPFL2015

Lessons Learned from Robotic Vacuum Cleaners Entering in the Home Ecosystem

Francesco Mondada, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Pierre Dillenbourg, Philippe Rétornaz, Julia Fink

This article considers the suitability of current robots designed to assist humans in accomplishing their daily domestic tasks. With several million units sold worldwide, robotic vacuum cleaners are currently the figurehead in this field. As such, we will ...

Elsevier2014

Which Robot Behavior Can Motivate Children to Tidy up Their Toys? Design and Evaluation of "Ranger"

Francesco Mondada, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Pierre Dillenbourg, Philippe Rétornaz, Alain Berthoud, Julia Fink, Séverin Lemaignan

We present the design approach and evaluation of our proto- type called “Ranger”. Ranger is a robotic toy box that aims to motivate young children to tidy up their room. We evalu- ated Ranger in 14 families with 31 children (2-10 years) using the Wizard-of ...

2014

Cooperative navigation in robotic swarms

Francesco Mondada, Stéphane Magnenat, Michael Bonani, Philippe Rétornaz

We study cooperative navigation for robotic swarms in the context of a general event-servicing scenario. In the scenario, one or more events need to be serviced at specific locations by robots with the required skills. We focus on the question of how the s ...

Springer Verlag2013

The Autonomous Photovoltaic MarXbot

Francesco Mondada, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Philippe Rétornaz, Martin Olivier Liniger

Domestic service robots are currently powered by the mains electricity. The growing multiplication of such devices negatively impacts our environment. In this study, we show the feasibility of harvesting energy from natural light in an indoor environment. ...

Springer Berlin Heidelberg2013

Seamless Multi-Robot Programming for the People: ASEBA and the Wireless Thymio II Robot

Francesco Mondada, Stéphane Magnenat, Michael Bonani, Fanny Riedo, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Philippe Rétornaz

IEEE2013

Swarmanoid: a novel concept for the study of heterogeneous robotic swarms

Francesco Mondada, Dario Floreano, Stéphane Magnenat, Michael Bonani, Daniel Burnier, Valentin Longchamp, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Philippe Rétornaz, James Roberts, Timothy Stirling

2013

Towards Long-Term Collective Experiments

Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Philippe Rétornaz, François Rey, Steven Adriaan Roelofsen

It is often challenging to manage the battery supply when dealing with a fleet of mobile robots during long experiments. If one uses classical recharge stations, then agents are immobilized during the whole recharge process. In this study, we present a nov ...

Springer Berlin Heidelberg2013

A two years informal learning experience using the Thymio robot

Francesco Mondada, Fanny Riedo, Philippe Rétornaz

Technology is playing an increasing role in our society. Therefore it becomes important to educate the general public, and young generations in particular, about the most common technologies. In this context, robots are excellent education tools, for many ...

Springer2012

Cutting Down the Energy Consumed by Domestic Robots: Insights from Robotic Vacuum Cleaners

Francesco Mondada, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Philippe Rétornaz

The market of domestic service robots, and especially vacuum cleaners, has kept growing during the past decade. According to the International Federation of Robotics, more than 1 million units were sold worldwide in 2010. Currently, there is no in-depth an ...

Springer Berlin Heidelberg2012

Physical interactions in swarm robotics: the hand-bot case study

Francesco Mondada, Hannes Bleuler, Stéphane Magnenat, Michael Bonani, Philippe Rétornaz

This paper presents a case-study on the performance achieved by the mechanical interactions of self-assembling mobile robots. This study is based on the hand-bot robot, designed to operate within heterogeneous swarms of robots. The hand-bot is specialized ...

Springer2012

Development of a mobile robot to study the collective behavior of zebrafish

Francesco Mondada, Philippe Rétornaz, Alexey Gribovskiy, Frank Bonnet

A robot accepted by animals as conspecifics is a very powerful tool in behavioral biology, particularly in studies of gregarious animals. In this paper we present a robotic zebrafish designed for experiments on the collective animal behavior. The robot con ...

Ieee2012

Towards Autonomous Energy-Wise RObjects

Francesco Mondada, Alcherio Martinoli, Michael Bonani, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Philippe Rétornaz

In this article, the RObject concept is first introduced. This is followed by a survey of applicable energy scavenging technologies. Energy is a key issue for the large scale deployment of robotics in daily life, as recharging the batteries places a consid ...

Springer Berlin Heidelberg2011

ASEBA: A Modular Architecture for Event-Based Control of Complex Robots

Francesco Mondada, Stéphane Magnenat, Michael Bonani, Valentin Longchamp, Philippe Rétornaz

We propose ASEA, a modular architecture for event-based control of complex robots. ASEBA runs scripts inside virtual machines on self-contained sensor and actuator nodes. This distributes processing with no loss of versatility and provides several benefits ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2011

Enhanced Directional Self-Assembly based on Active Recruitment and Guidance

Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani, Philippe Rétornaz

IEEE Press2011

A Social Approach for Target Localization: Simulation and Implementation in the marXbot Robot

Francesco Mondada, Andres Perez-Uribe, Andres Upegui, Philippe Rétornaz

Foraging is a common benchmark problem in collective robotics in which a robot (the forager) explores a given environment while collecting items for further deposition at specific locations. A typical real-world application of foraging is garbage collectio ...

2011

Affordable SLAM through the Co-Design of Hardware and Methodology

Francesco Mondada, Hannes Bleuler, Paolo Germano, Stéphane Magnenat, Michael Bonani, Valentin Longchamp, Philippe Rétornaz

SLAM is a prominent feature for autonomous robots operating in undefined environments. Applications areas such as consumer robotics appliances would clearly benefit from low-cost and compact SLAM implementations. The SLAM research community has developed s ...

IEEE Press2010

The MarXbot, a Miniature Mobile Robot Opening new Perspectives for the Collective-robotic Research

Francesco Mondada, Hannes Bleuler, Stéphane Magnenat, Michael Bonani, Daniel Burnier, Valentin Longchamp, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Philippe Rétornaz, Gilles Roulet

Collective and swarm robotics explores scenarios involving many robots running at the same time. A good platform for collective-robotic experiments should provide certain features among others: it should have a large battery life, it should be able to perc ...

IEEE Press2010

Design and Psychophysical Evaluation of a Tactile Pulse Display for Teleoperated Artery Palpation

Hannes Bleuler, Roger Gassert, Philippe Rétornaz, Kaspar Leuenberger, Laura Santos Carreras

During traditional open procedures, surgeons directly palpate tissues before dissecting them. In this way, they can avoid the accidental damage of hidden arteries that can lead to fatal hemorrhage. New Minimally Invasive Surgical (MIS) techniques progressi ...

IEEE2010