Publications associées à The Ethical Landscape of Robotics

Distributed Predictive Formation Control of Autonomous Rotary-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles

This doctoral thesis navigates the complex landscape of motion coordination and formation control within teams of rotary-wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Prompted by the intricate demands of real-world applications such as search and rescue or surveillan ...

EPFL2024

Sense in Motion with Belief Clustering: Efficient Gas Source Localization with Mobile Robots

Alcherio Martinoli, Wanting Jin

Given the patchy nature of gas plumes and the slow response of conventional gas sensors, the use of mobile robots for Gas Source Localization (GSL) tasks presents significant challenges. These aspects increase the difficulties in obtaining gas measurements ...

2024

A Biohybrid Superorganism - Investigating honeybees' collective behaviors via interactive robotics

Rafael Botner Barmak

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where the collaborative efforts of "simple" individuals can lead to the emergence of complex dynamics. The reliance of each organism on the collective is so great t ...

EPFL2024

Memento Mori: Reliable robustness in self-reconfigurable modular robots

Kevin Andrew Holdcroft

Modular robotics link the reliability of a centralised system with the adaptivity of a decentralised system. It is difficult for a robot with a fixed shape to be able to perform many different types of tasks. As the task space grows, the number of functi ...

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

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

Voices from the Frontline: Revealing the AI Practitioners' viewpoint on the European AI Act

Kathrin Grosse

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in an ever larger number of industries. Alongside this development, however, abundant works argue that AI-driven systems are lacking in terms of safety, ethics and transparency. As a direct consequence, the ...

2024

Hitting with Different Joints of a Robotic Manipulator

Aude Billard, Harshit Khurana

This paper builds up the skill of impact aware non prehensile manipulation through a hitting motion by allowing the robot arm to come in contact with the environment with parts other than its end effector. Hitting with other joints allows us to manipulate ...

2024

Online Multicontact Receding Horizon Planning via Value Function Approximation

Sylvain Calinon, Teguh Santoso Lembono

Planning multicontact motions in a receding horizon fashion requires a value function to guide the planning with respect to the future, e.g., building momentum to traverse large obstacles. Traditionally, the value function is approximated by computing traj ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Quantifying the biomimicry gap in biohybrid robot-fish pairs

Francesco Mondada, Vaios Papaspyros

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

Robot Learning using Tensor Networks

Suhan Narayana Shetty

In various robotics applications, the selection of function approximation methods greatly influences the feasibility and computational efficiency of algorithms. Tensor Networks (TNs), also referred to as tensor decomposition techniques, present a versatile ...

EPFL2024

Towards edible robots and robotic food

Dario Floreano, Jun Shintake, Bokeon Kwak, Markéta Pankhurst

Edible robots and robotic food — edible systems that perceive, process and act upon stimulation — could open a new range of opportunities in health care, environmental management and the promotion of healthier eating habits. For example, they could enable ...

2024

Soft Robotics: A Route to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity in Robotics

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes

Robotics is entering our daily lives. The discipline is increasingly crucial in fields such as agriculture, medicine, and rescue operations, impacting our food, health, and planet. At the same time, it is becoming evident that robotic research must embrace ...

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc2024

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Raphael Cherfan

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...

2024

Participatory design of a social robot and robot-mediated storytelling activity to raise awareness of gender inequality among children

Romain Maure, Barbara Bruno

Gender inequality is a widespread problem in our society. It can manifest itself in many ways and contexts, and starting as early as primary school. While an increasing number of initiatives aim at tackling gender biases and inequalities, few of them are a ...

IEEE2023

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

An Autonomous Robotic Platform to Manipulate Collective Behavior in Ants

Matthias Rüegg

Eusocial life is characterized by division of labour, collective decision making and self organization, and regarded as the highest form of social organisation in groups. Ants are a model organism for research in collective behavior and the evolution of eu ...

EPFL2023

Computational Models of Mutual Understanding for Human-Robot Collaborative Learning

Utku Norman

There is a growing trend towards designing learning activities featuring robots as collaborative exercises where children work together to achieve the activity objectives, generating interactions that can trigger learning processes. Witnessing such activit ...

EPFL2023

Avian-Inspired Claws Enable Robot Perching or Walking

Dario Floreano, William John Stewart, Won Dong Shin, Mohammad Askari

Multimodal unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rarely capable of more than two modalities, i.e., flying and walking or flying and perching. However, being able to fly, perch, and walk could further improve their usefulness by expanding their operating enve ...

2023

Multi-Robot 3D Gas Distribution Mapping: Coordination, Information Sharing and Environmental Knowledge

Alcherio Martinoli, Chiara Ercolani, Thomas Laurent Peeters

Environmental monitoring and mapping operations are an essential tool to combat climate change. An important branch of this domain concerns the construction of reliable gas maps. Adaptive navigation strategies coupled with multi-robot systems improve the o ...

2023