Publications by Francesco Mondada

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

This demo presents a miniature mobile robot performing autonomous construction in an environment where resources are limited. After an exploration phase, the robot builds a structure at a designated location according to an order from a human. Since local ...

It is argued that competitive co-evolution is a viable methodology for developing truly autonomous and intelligent machines capable of setting their own goals in order to face new and continuously changing challenges. The paper starts giving an introduction to the dynamics of competitive co-evolutionary systems and reviews their relevance from a computational perspective. The method is then applied to two mobile robots, a predator and a prey, which quickly and autonomously develop efficient chase and evasio

We present a new type of robot concept called swarm-bot, based on cooperative and swarm intelligence, that was developed within an interdisciplinary project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies of the European Commission. A swarm-bot is an assembly of several mobile robots (called s-bots), which can operate both autonomously and as a group. The unique feature of the project is that s-bots can exploit physical interconnections to self-assemble into a bigger entity, a swarm-bot, capable of tackli

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 ...

This systematic review analyzes how professional development (PD) initiatives support primary school teachers in integrating digital education (DE) into classrooms. Based on the findings of eight studies, it examines the barriers addressed, the PD features employed, and their effectiveness. Most reviewed programs targeted teacher-centric barriers, such as beliefs, knowledge, and confidence, using active learning and content-focused instruction. However, external barriers—including institutional support, ass

Perception is needed for action, not for the pure sake of the construction of abstract representations, although it does not exclude the role of internal representations for mediating complex behaviors. We think that, for the purpose of building autonomous robots, active perception requires specific recipes for three related aspects: the design of the physical sensory system, the modality and type of information extracted, and the structure and functioning of the control system. We outline a set of solution

The field of mobile robotics offers a new medium for public entertainment and art. Mobile robots can move, react, and interact in the real world, generating behaviors that can be used as a new artistic medium quite different from sculptures, drawings or video. This new medium, like other technological media such as video or the Internet, requires considerable technical know-how to be exploited successfully. The successful design of a mobile robot demands a strong interdisciplinary and systems-oriented engin

This paper describes the Magnebike robot, a compact robot with two magnetic wheels in a motorbike arrangement, which is intended for inspecting the inner casing of ferromagnetic pipes with complex-shaped structures. The locomotion concept is based on an ad ...

Research has shown that Educational Robotics (ER) enhances student performance, interest, engagement and collaboration. However, until now, the adoption of robotics in formal education has remained relatively scarce. Among other causes, this is due to the ...

In this article, we present Cellulo, a novel robotic platform that investigates the intersection of three ideas for robotics in education: designing the robots to be versatile and generic tools; blending robots into the classroom by designing them to be pe ...

The objective of this study is to integrate biomimetic robots into small groups of zebrafish and to modulate their collective behaviours. A possible approach is to have the robots behave like sheepdogs. In this case, the robots would behave like a differen ...

Autonomous construction by mobile robots would be useful in various situations, such as in outer space, in hazardous environments, but also for the building industry. Current works tackle simplified scenarios where environment is flat and resources readily available; moreover robots build simple structures. However, target applications would feature complex 3D environments, remote resources, and would require the construction of multi-layer structures of various types. In this poster, we show our current wo

This paper provides an overview of the SWARM-BOTS project, a robotic project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Community (IST-2000-31010). The paper illustrates the robot hardware, and the results of experimental works in which distributed adaptive controllers are designed to allow the agents to perform a variety of tasks which require cooperation and coordination among the members of a group.

The swarm intelligence paradigm has proven to have very interesting properties such as robustness, flexibility and ability to solve complex problems exploiting parallelism and self-organization. Several robotics implementations of this paradigm confirm that these properties can be exploited by the control of a population of physically independent mobile robots. We present a new robotic concept called swarmbot where the collective interaction exploited by the swarm intelligence mechanism goes beyond the cont

Climbing robots require an adhesion principle in order to overcome gravity. Many physical principles have been used. In this work, the use of thermal glue is proposed. The implementation of miniature thermal glue dispenser is presented with experimental re ...

Design, study, and control of mixed animals-robots societies is the field of scientific exploration that can bring new opportunities for study and control of groups of social animals. In the Chicken Robot project we develop a mobile robot, socially accepta ...

Peer-argumentation is an effective and widely adopted learning activity, yet it remains difficult to enact at scale. While pedagogical conversational agents (PCAs) have been extensively studied, their role as arguing peers that engage students in dialogic argumentation is underexplored. To address this gap, we present ArguBot, a didactic AI arguing partner designed to support scalable case-based peer-argumentation activities. ArguBot deliberately adopts an opposing stance, challenging students' correct clai

This paper proposed a fuzzy controller for the autonomous navigation problem of robotic systems in a dynamic and uncertain environment. In particular, we are interested in determining the robot motion to reach the target while ensuring their own safety and ...

We present in this paper a realistic looking robotic survival challenge simulation. Using a model of the e-puck, an open-source mobile robot designed for educational purposes, our simulation allows several players to program the behaviour of e-pucks compet ...

Robotic animals are nowadays developed for various types of research, such as bioinspired robotics, biomimetics, and animal behavioral studies. The design of these robots poses great challenges as they often have to achieve very high-level performances in ...

Francesco Mondada

Chat with Graph Search

Autonomous construction with a mobile robot in a resource-limited environment: a demonstration of the integration of perception, planning and action

Competitive Co-Evolutionary Robotics: From Theory to Practice

The cooperation of swarm-bots: physical interactions in collective robotics

Cooperative navigation in robotic swarms

Professional development responses to digital education barriers in primary schools: A systematic review

Active Perception, Navigation, Homing, and Grasping: An autonomous Perspective

Interactions between Art and Mobile Robotic System Engineering

Magnebike: A Magnetic Wheeled Robot with High Mobility for Inspecting Complex-Shaped Structures

Investigating the Role of Educational Robotics in Formal Mathematics Education: The Case of Geometry for 15-Year-Old Students

Cellulo: Versatile Handheld Robots for Education

Strategies to modulate zebrafish collective dynamics with a closed-loop biomimetic robotic system

Autonomous Construction by a Mobile Robot in Unknown Environments with Scarce Resources

The SWARM-BOTS project

SWARM-BOT: a New Distributed Robotic Concept

Climbing robot with thermal glue

Real-Time Audio-Visual Calls Detection System for a Chicken Robot

More Correcting or Confounding? When an AI Arguing Agent Informed by Common Student Misconceptions Joins Case-Based Peer-Argumentation in a Real Course

Fuzzy Control System for Autonomous Navigation and Parking of Thymio II Mobile Robots

Aseba-Challenge: An Open-Source Multiplayer Introduction to Mobile Robots Programming

Design of a modular robotic system that mimics small fish locomotion and body movements for ethological studies