Publications by Francesco Mondada

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Context With the introduction of computer science (CS) into curricula worldwide, teachers’ adoption of CS-pedagogical content is essential to ensure the long-term success of reform initiatives. Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programs play a key ...

One of the main issues with the acceptance of robotic tools in schools is the extracurricular aspect of the learning activities using these robots. In the Cellulo project, we developed a novel robotic platform that aims to provide a ubiquitous, versatile a ...

Background: Educational robotics (ER) is increasingly used in classrooms to implement activities aimed at fostering the development of students’ computational thinking (CT) skills. Though previous works have proposed different models and frameworks to desc ...

Computing infrastructures of mobile robots have grown in complexity in the last decades; They have evolved from single processor systems to networks of microcontrollers communicating through a shared bus. This has induced additional architectural constrain ...

Effective radioactive hotspot localization and detection is limited by sensor characteristics (i.e., the long acquisition time and poor angular resolution AR of a gamma camera) that significantly degrade the performance of autonomous exploration in terms o ...

This short paper explains how the Khepera robot was developed, from the initial idea to the its commercialisation by K-Team. The goal of this paper is not a scientific analysis but an historical overview of the steps made in the development of this robot since 1991. The papers introduces first the situation of the team who started the development, then decisions made in creating the actual Khepera are briefly described, as well as some important steps in the commercialisation of the robot. We conclude with

We present a miniature magnetic climbing robot with dimensions 96 x 46 x 64mm(3). With two degrees of freedom it is able to climb ferromagnetic surfaces and to make inner plane to plane transitions whatever their inclination is. This robot, named TRIPILLAR ...

This paper presents a new robotic concept, called SWARM-BOT, based on a swarm of autonomous mobile robots with self-assembling capabilities. SWARM-BOT takes advantage from collective and distributed approaches to ensure robustness to failures and to hard environment conditions in tasks such as navigation, search and transportation in rough terrain. One SWARM-BOT is composed of a number of simpler robots, called s-bots, physically interconnected. The SWARM-BOT is provided with self-assembling and self-reconf

In this article, the RObject concept is first introduced. This is followed by a survey of applicable energy scavenging technologies. Energy is a key issue for the large scale deployment of robotics in daily life, as recharging the batteries places a consid ...

Foraging is a common benchmark problem in collective robotics in which a robot (the forager) explores a given environment while collecting items for further deposition at specific locations. A typical real-world application of foraging is garbage collectio ...

We explore the problem of resource allocation in a system made up of autonomous agents that can either carry out tasks individually or, when necessary, cooperate by forming physical connections with each other. We consider a group transport scenario that i ...

A Magnetic Switchable Device (MSD) is a ferromagnetic circuit using permanent magnets where the flux can circulate between different paths when its configuration is changed. This routes or cancels the flux through specific surfaces, and thus turns on or of ...

Autonomous mobile robots are promising tools for operations in environments that are difficult to access for humans. When these environments are dynamic and non-deterministic, like in collapsed buildings, the robots must coordinate their actions and the us ...

Design, study, and control of mixed animals-robots societies are the fields of scientific exploration that can bring new opportunities for study and control of groups of social insects and animals and, in particular, for improvement of welfare and breeding ...

In this paper, we discuss the self-assembling capabilities of the swarm-bot, a distributed robotics concept that lies at the intersection between collective and self-reconfigurable robotics. A swarm-bot comprises autonomous mobile robots called s-bots. S-b ...

Robots have the potential to display a higher degree of lifetime morphological adaptation than natural organisms. By adopting a modular approach, robots with different capabilities, shapes, and sizes could, in theory, construct and reconfigure themselves a ...

This paper presents the concept and an example of robject, a robotic entity embedded in an everyday object. Robjects use the affordance of the original object to ensure an efficient interaction and a high acceptance. The example of the ranger robot shows t ...

In this paper, we develop an autonomous construction system in which self-contained ground robots build a protective barrier by means of compliant pockets. We present a stochastic control algorithm based on two biological mechanisms–stigmergy and templates ...

Design and study of mixed animal-robot societies are the fields of scientific exploration that can bring new opportunities for research into the group behavior of social animals. Our goal is to develop a Chicken Robot – an autonomous mobile robot, socially ...

This paper describes an alternative path towards artificial life-one by which simple modular robots with novel hybrid motion control are used to represent artificial organisms. We outline conceptually how such a system would work, and present a partial har ...

Francesco Mondada

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The TACS Model: Understanding Primary School Teachers’ Adoption of Computer Science Pedagogical Content

Windfield: Demonstrating Wind Meteorology with Handheld Haptic Robots

Fostering computational thinking through educational robotics: a model for creative computational problem solving

ASEBA, an event-based middleware for distributed robot control

Autonomous Exploration for Radioactive Hotspots Localization Taking Account of Sensor Limitations

The Development of Khepera

TRIPILLAR: Miniature magnetic caterpillar climbing robot with plane transition ability

SWARM-BOT: From Concept to Implementation

Towards Autonomous Energy-Wise RObjects

A Social Approach for Target Localization: Simulation and Implementation in the marXbot Robot

Swarm-bots to the Rescue

Design of Magnetic Switchable Device (MSD) and applications in climbing robot

Planner9, a HTN planner distributed on groups of miniature mobile robots

Audio-visual detection of multiple chirping robots

Autonomous Self-assembly in Swarm-Bots

Mergeable nervous systems for robots (vol 8, 439, 2017)

Ranger, an Example of Integration of Robotics into the Home Ecosystem

Bio-inspired construction with mobile robots and compliant pockets

Design of Collision Avoidance System for a Chicken Robot Based on Fuzzy Relation Equations

Evo-Bots: A Simple, Stochastic Approach to Self-assembling Artificial Organisms