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Francesco Mondada

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Related publications (174)

Page 2 of 9

Autonomous construction using scarce resources in unknown environments - Ingredients for an intelligent robotic interaction with the physical world

Francesco Mondada, Stéphane Magnenat, Roland Philippsen

The goal of creating machines that autonomously perform useful work in a safe, robust and intelligent manner continues to motivate robotics research. Achieving this autonomy requires capabilities for understanding the environment, physically interacting wi ...

Springer Verlag2012

The Autonomous Photovoltaic MarXbot

Francesco Mondada, Philippe Rétornaz, Florian Christopher Vaussard, 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

Robot swarms as an educational tool: The Thymio’s way

Francesco Mondada

Robotics provides useful tools for educational purposes, allowing to engage students in learning within disparate domains, from computer science and artificial intelligence – traditionally the main domains for educational robotics – to general education, h ...

2019

Modelling the sustainability of a primary school digital education curricular reform and professional development program

Francesco Mondada, Barbara Bruno, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy, Morgane Solène Denise Chevalier, Sunny Jonathan Jean-Jacques Laurent Avry, Emilie-Charlotte Monnier

Sustaining changes in teachers’ practices is a challenge that determines the success of curricular reforms, from which Digital Education (DE) is not exempt. As the literature on sustainability is considered “scarce” and “scattered”, long-term studies model ...

2023

Cooperation through self-assembly in multi-robot

Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani

This article illustrates the methods and results of two sets of experiments in which a group of mobile robots, called s-bots, are required to physically connect to each other, that is, to self-assemble, to cope with environmental conditions that prevent th ...

2006

Social Integrating Robots Suggest Mitigation Strategies for Ecosystem Decay

Francesco Mondada, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Frank Bonnet, Rafael Botner Barmak

We develop here a novel hypothesis that may generate a general research framework of how autonomous robots may act as a future contingency to counteract the ongoing ecological mass extinction process. We showcase several research projects that have underta ...

2021

Bio-Hybrid Systems for Ecosystem Level Effects

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

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

Towards an Autonomous Evolution of Non-Biological Physical Organisms

Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani, Stéphane Magnenat

We propose an experimental study where simplistic organ- isms rise from inanimate matter and evolve solely through physical interactions. These organisms are composed of three types of macroscopic building blocks floating in an agitated medium. The dynamis ...

Springer Verlag2011

TRIPILLAR: Miniature magnetic caterpillar climbing robot with plane transition ability

Francesco Mondada, Frédéric Rochat, Patrick Schoeneich

In this paper, we describe a miniature climbing robot, 96 x 46 x 64 [mm3], able to climb ferromagnetic surfaces and to make inner plane to plane transition using only two degrees of freedom. Our robot, named TRIPILLAR, combines magnetic caterpillars and ma ...

World Scientific2009

Teachers’ Perspectives on Using and Teaching Artificial Intelligence in Early Primary Education

Francesco Mondada, Victoria Abou Khalil, Valentina Ferraioli

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated into various aspects of daily life, the need for AI literacy continues to grow. Accordingly, both educators and students must develop a critical understanding of AI systems and acquire the ski ...

Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH2025

A robotic honeycomb for interaction with a honeybee colony

Francesco Mondada, Rafael Botner Barmak, Robert Matthew Mills

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

Teamwork in Self-Organized Robot Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani

Swarm robotics draws inspiration from decentralized self-organizing biological systems in general and from the collective behavior of social insects in particular. In social insect colonies, many tasks are performed by higher order group or team entities, ...

2009

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

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

FADE-CTP: A Framework for the Analysis and Design of Educational Computational Thinking Problems

Alberto Piatti, Francesco Mondada, Engin Walter Bumbacher

In recent years, the emphasis on computational thinking (CT) has intensified as an effect of accelerated digitalisation. While most researchers are concentrating on defining CT and developing tools for its instruction and assessment, we focus on the charac ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2025

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

The competent Computational Thinking Test: Development and Validation of an Unplugged Computational Thinking Test for Upper Primary School

Francesco Mondada, Barbara Bruno, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy

With the increasing importance of Computational Thinking (CT) at all levels of education, it is essential to have valid and reliable assessments. Currently, there is a lack of such assessments in upper primary school. That is why we present the development ...

2022

Follow the dummy: measuring the influence of a biomimetic robotic fish-lure on the collective decisions of a zebrafish shoal inside a circular corridor

Francesco Mondada, Frank Bonnet

Robotic agents that are accepted by animals as conspecifics are very powerful tools in behavioral biology because of the ways they help in studying social interactions in gregarious animals. In recent years, we have developed a biomimetic robotic fish lure ...

2018

Device and method for sorting biological entities

Marcin Antoni Sylwestrzak, Francesco Mondada, Frank Bonnet, Norbert Crot

A device for sorting biological entities is disclosed. The device comprises a channel to canalize the biological entities and a selector having slots to accommodate said entities. Means for detecting and analysing an optical parameter of the biological ent ...

2019

Accessible Maker-based Approaches to Educational Robotics in Online Learning

Francesco Mondada, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy, Christian Giang, Amaury Robert Dame, Aditya Mehrotra

Educational Robotics holds the potential to promote the development of important 21st century skills, such as creativity and problem-solving skills in addition to digital literacy. However, the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic has posed particular obstac ...

2021

The CT-cube: A framework for the design and the assessment of computational thinking activities

Francesco Mondada, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy, Alberto Piatti

Computational thinking is a fundamental competence that is being introduced in K-12 and succeeding curricula worldwide. Despite this huge effort, many computational thinking models in the literature do not explicitly take into consideration the pupils’ age ...

2022