Publications associées à Targeted worker removal reveals a lack of flexibility in brood transport specialisation with no compensatory gain in efficiency

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

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

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

Host-derived organic acids enable gut colonization of the honey bee symbiont Snodgrassella alvi

Anders Meibom, Stéphane Laurent Escrig

Diverse bacteria can colonize the animal gut using dietary nutrients or by engaging in microbial crossfeeding interactions. Less is known about the role of host-derived nutrients in enabling gut bacterial colonization. Here we examined metabolic interactio ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Architecture of a decentralised decision support system for futuristic beehives

Francesco Mondada, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Robert Matthew Mills

Honeybees are essential to human society, providing pollination services globally as well as producing honey and other valuable products. Effective management of apiaries should not only rely on beekeeper knowledge and skill, but also incorporate new infor ...

2024

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

Izzet Kagan Erünsal

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

Avoidance of Concave Obstacles Through Rotation of Nonlinear Dynamics

Aude Billard, Lukas Huber

Controlling complex tasks in robotic systems, such as circular motion for cleaning or following curvy lines, can be dealt with using nonlinear vector fields. This article introduces a novel approach called the rotational obstacle avoidance method (ROAM) fo ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

A lunar reconnaissance drone for cooperative exploration and high-resolution mapping of extreme locations

Erik Uythoven, Thomas Pfeiffer, Daniel Tataru, David Rodriguez Martinez

An efficient characterization of scientifically significant locations is essential prior to the return of humans to the Moon. The highest resolution imagery acquired from orbit of south-polar shadowed regions and other relevant locations remains, at best, ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Geometric Learning: Leveraging differential geometry for learning and control

Bernardo Fichera

In this thesis, we concentrate on advancing high-level behavioral control policies for robotic systems within the framework of Dynamical Systems (DS). Throughout the course of this research, a unifying thread weaving through diverse fields emerges, and tha ...

EPFL2024

A robotic honeycomb for interaction with a honeybee colony

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak

Robotic technologies have shown the capability to interact with living organisms and even to form integrated mixed societies composed of living and artificial agents. Biocompatible robots, incorporating sensing and actuation capable of generating and respo ...

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

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

Development of a Robotic Microsurgeon for Embryonic Research

Ece Özelçi

Understanding how biological matter takes its shape is instrumental to biology, bioengineering, medicine, and bioinspired engineering. Gaining information on the principles of morphogenesis could enable clinicians to correct developmental abnormalities, ev ...

EPFL2023

Training Efficient Controllers via Analytic Policy Gradient

Dario Floreano, Davide Scaramuzza, Valentin Wüest

Control design for robotic systems is complex and often requires solving an optimization to follow a trajectory accurately. Online optimization approaches like Model Predictive Control (MPC) have been shown to achieve great tracking performance, but requir ...

New York2023

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

Self-Correcting Quadratic Programming-Based Robot Control

Aude Billard, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis, Farshad Khadivar

Quadratic Programming (QP)-based controllers allow many robotic systems, such as humanoids, to successfully undertake complex motions and interactions. However, these approaches rely heavily on adequately capturing the underlying model of the environment a ...

2023

Morphological flexibility in robotic systems through physical polygon meshing

Jamie Paik, Christoph Heinrich Belke, Kevin Andrew Holdcroft, Alexander Thomas Sigrist

Shape-changing robots adapt their own morphology to address a wider range of functions or environments than is possible with a fixed or rigid structure. Akin to biological organisms, the ability to alter shape or configuration emerges from the underlying m ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Robotic manipulation to investigate the physical principles of biological self-organization

Fazil Emre Uslu

Self-organization is the spontaneous formation of ordered patterns and networks from a population of comparatively simple elements or individuals with no prior information on neither the formation process nor the final organization. While the construction ...

EPFL2022

Leveraging Multi-Level Modelling to Automatically Design Behavioral Arbitrators in Robotic Controllers

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann, Hugo Richard Birch

Automatic control design for robotic systems is becoming more and more popular. However, this usually involves a significant computational cost, due to the expensive and noisy evaluation of candidate solutions through highfidelity simulation or even real h ...

2022

Electro-Adhesive Tubular Clutch for Variable-Stiffness Robots

Dario Floreano, Yi Sun, Krishna Manaswi Digumarti, Omar Aloui, Hoang Vu Phan

Electro-adhesive clutches have become effective tools for variable stiffness functions in many robotic systems due to their light weight, high speed and strong brake force. In this paper, we present a novel, tubular design of an electro-adhesive clutch. Ou ...

IEEE2022

Controlling Maneuverability of a Bio-Inspired Swimming Robot Through Morphological Transformation

Nana Obayashi, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge, Francesco Stella

Biology provides many examples of where body adaption can be used to achieve a change in functionality. The feather star, an underwater crinoid which uses feather arms to locomote and feed, is one such system; it releases its arms to distract prey and vary ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022