Publications associées à Gaze Estimation in the 3D Space Using RGB-D Sensors

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

Investigating neural resource allocation in the sensorimotor control of extra limbs

Giulia Dominijanni

The rise of robotic body augmentation brings forth new developments that will transform robotics, human-machine interaction, and wearable electronics. Extra robotic limbs, although building upon restorative technologies, bring their own set of challenges i ...

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

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

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

3D printed large amplitude torsional microactuators powered by ultrasound

Mehdi Ali Gadiri, Mahmut Selman Sakar, Amit Yedidia Dolev, Junsun Hwang

Here, we introduce a design, fabrication, and control methodology for large amplitude torsional microactuators powered by ultrasound. The microactuators are 3D printed from two polymers with drastically different elastic moduli as a monolithic compliant me ...

2024

Non-verbal Communication between Humans and Robots: Imitation, Mutual Understanding and Inferring Object Properties

Nuno Ricardo Ferreira Duarte

Humans can express their actions and intentions, resorting to verbal and/or non-verbal communication. In verbal communication, humans use language to express, in structured linguistic terms, the desired action they wish to perform. Non-verbal communication ...

EPFL2023

Human Interactive Robotic Surfaces for Physical Immersion

Fabio Zuliani

Computers have long been augmenting human capabilities and communication, and with emerging technologies, physical immersion in virtual worlds is now attainable. These advancements push the boundaries of human potential, allowing designers, architects, eng ...

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

Prescribing Cartesian Stiffness of Soft Robots by Co-Optimization of Shape and Segment-Level Stiffness

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Soft robots aim to revolutionize how robotic systems interact with the environment thanks to their inherent compliance. Some of these systems are even able to modulate their physical softness. However, simply equipping a robot with softness will not genera ...

MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC2023

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

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

Robotic Assembly of Integrally-Attached Timber Plate Structures: From Computational Design to Automated Construction

Nicolas Henry Pierre Louis Rogeau

The digitization of timber construction, the emergence of engineered wood products, and the urgent need to drastically reduce buildings' environmental impact have given a rebirth to wood as a construction material. On the one hand, increasing the use of ti ...

EPFL2023

Geometric and Learning Methods for Robots to Navigate in Human Crowds with Application to Smart Mobility Devices

David Julian Gonon

The thesis at hand is concerned with robots' navigation in human crowds. Specifically, methods are developed for planning a mobile robot's local motion between pedestrians, and they are evaluated in experiments where a robot interacts with real pedestrians ...

EPFL2023

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

Vaios Papaspyros

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

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

Immediate effects of short-duration wellbeing practices on children’s handwriting and posture guided by a social robot

Pierre Dillenbourg, Chenyang Wang, Barbara Bruno, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore, Melike Cezayirlioglu

Handwriting practising, as any other repetitive task, often leads the practiser to an overconcentration state where their performance might be affected by postural and mental fatigue. Short breaks to perform unrelated activities, especially relaxation exer ...

2023

Piecewise Affine Curvature model: a reduced-order model for soft robot-environment interaction beyond PCC

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella, Qinghua Guan

Soft robot are celebrated for their propensity to enable compliant and complex robot-environment interactions. Soft robotic manipulators, or slender continuum structure robots have the potential to exploit these interactions to enable new exploration and m ...

IEEE2023