Publications by André Guignard

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Many aquatic animals, including larval zebrafish, exhibit intermittent locomotion, moving via discrete swimming bouts followed by passive glides rather than continuous movement. However, fundamental questions remain unresolved: What neural mechanisms drive this behavior, and what functional benefits does this behavior offer? Specifically, is intermittent swimming more energy efficient than continuous swimming, and, if so, by what mechanism? Live-animal experiments pose technical challenges, because observin

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

We present a new robotic concept, called SWARM-BOT, based on a swarm of small and simple autonomous mobile robots called S-BOTs. S-BOTs have a particular assembling capability that allows them to connect physically to other S-BOTs and form a bigger robot entity, the SWARM-BOT. A SWARM-BOT is typically composed by 10 to 30 S-BOTs physically interconnected. S-BOTs can autonomously assemble into a SWARM-BOT but also disassemble again. This feature of the S-BOTs provides SWARM-BOT with self-assembling and self-

We describe a new multi-robot system, named SWARM-BOTS, that exploits physical inter-connections to solve tasks that are impossible for a single robot. This is for instance the case of passing large gaps or high steps in all-terrain conditions. In order to achieve this type of autonomous collective operations, the design of the type of connection, as well as its sensors and actuators, plays a key role. This paper presents the choices made in the SWARM-BOTS project and the know-how collected until now. The r

A swarm-bot is a robotic entity built of several autonomous mobile robots (called s-bots) physically connected together. This form of collective robotics exploits robot interactions both at the behavioral and physical levels. The goal of this paper is to a ...

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

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

Unpowered flight can be used in microrobotics to overcome ground obstacles and to increase the traveling distance per energy unit. In order to explore the potential of goal-directed gliding in the domain of miniature robotics, we developed a 22cm microglid ...

Summarizing, we present a 1.5g gliding robot that can do phototaxis as a first step towards a novel palm sized self deploying microglider. To reduce the weight, we developed a 0.2g SMA actuator for rudder control that is harmoniously integrated in the airframe structure. We show that gliding flight is an energy efficient and easy to use aerial locomotion method for small robots.

Jumping can be a very efficient mode of locomotion for small robots to overcome large obstacles and travel in natural, rough terrain. In this paper we present the development and characterization of a novel 5cm, 7g jumping robot. It can jump obstacles as h ...

The Self Deploying Microglider project aims at developing a novel palm sized robot that can climb up walls, deploy itself into the air, recover from every position in air and perform subsequent goal directed gliding and attachment to walls. So far, we developed a 1.5g SMA actuated Microglider that can perform phototaxis, a 4.5g wing folding mechanism that allows for very quick unfolding (50msec) of the wings and a 7g jumping mechanism that can jump up to 23times its size (corresponds to 1.15m). The applicat

André Guignard

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Energy efficiency and neural control of continuous versus intermittent swimming in a fishlike robot

SWARM-BOT: a New Distributed Robotic Concept

SWARM-BOT: A Swarm of Autonomous Mobile Robots with Self-Assembling Capabilities

Physical connections and cooperation in swarm robotics

Superlinear Physical Performances in a SWARM-BOT

The Development of Khepera

SWARM-BOT: From Concept to Implementation

A 1.5g SMA-actuated Microglider looking for the Light

A 1.5g SMA actuated Microglider looking for the Light

A miniature 7g jumping robot

Self Deploying Microglider

Khepera: The Optimal Tool for Development in Mobile Robotics