Publications by Stéphane Magnenat

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.

The present work tackles integration in mobile robotics. Integration is often considered to be a mere technique, unworthy of scientific investigation. On the contrary, we show that integrating capabilities in a mobile robot entails new questions that the p ...

The efficiency of social insect colonies critically depends on their ability to efficiently allocate workers to the various tasks which need to be performed. While numerous models have investigated the mechanisms allowing an efficient colony response to ex ...

We study a simple algorithm inspired by the Brazil nut effect for achieving segregation in a swarm of mobile robots. The algorithm lets each robot mimic a particle of a certain size and broadcast this information locally. The motion of each particle is con ...

Information transfer plays a central role in the biology of most organisms, particularly social species [1, 2]. Although the neurophysiological processes by which signals are produced, conducted, perceived, and interpreted are well understood, the conditio ...

The robotics research community has clearly acknowledged the need of open and standard software stacks to promote reuse of code and developments. However, to date no particular project has prevailed. We suggest that one possible reason for this is that mos ...

In recent years, robots have been surfing on a trendy wave as standard devices for teaching programming. The tangibility of robotics platforms allows for collaborative and interactive learning. Moreover, with these robot platforms, we also observe the occu ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In this paper, we present Ishtar, a lightweight and versatile collection of software for remote data access and monitoring. The monitoring architecture is crucial during the development and experimentation of autonomous systems like Micro Air Vehicles. Ishtar comprises a flexible communication layer that allows enumeration, inspection and modification of data in the remote system. The protocol is designed to be robust to the data loss and corruption that typically arises with small autonomous system, while

We propose ASEA, a modular architecture for event-based control of complex robots. ASEBA runs scripts inside virtual machines on self-contained sensor and actuator nodes. This distributes processing with no loss of versatility and provides several benefits ...

SLAM is a prominent feature for autonomous robots operating in undefined environments. Applications areas such as consumer robotics appliances would clearly benefit from low-cost and compact SLAM implementations. The SLAM research community has developed s ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

Mobile robots have the potential to become the ideal tool to teach a broad range of engineering disciplines. Indeed, mobile robots are getting increasingly complex and accessible. They embed elements from diverse ﬁelds such as mechanics, digital electronic ...

Collective and swarm robotics explores scenarios involving many robots running at the same time. A good platform for collective-robotic experiments should provide certain features among others: it should have a large battery life, it should be able to perc ...

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 ...

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 ...

Stéphane Magnenat

Chat with Graph Search

Software integration in mobile robotics, a science to scale up machine intelligence

Division of labour and colony efficiency in social insects: effects of interactions between genetic architecture, colony kin structure and rate of perturbations

Segregation in swarms of mobile robots based on the Brazil nut effect

Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Communication in Robots

Aseba Meets D-Bus: From the Depths of a Low-Level Event-

Augmented Robotics for Learners: A Case Study on Optics

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

Towards an Autonomous Evolution of Non-Biological Physical Organisms

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

Ishtar: a flexible and lightweight software for remote data access

ASEBA: A Modular Architecture for Event-Based Control of Complex Robots

Affordable SLAM through the Co-Design of Hardware and Methodology

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

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

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

The e-puck, a Robot Designed for Education in Engineering

The MarXbot, a Miniature Mobile Robot Opening new Perspectives for the Collective-robotic Research

Physical connections and cooperation in swarm robotics

Superlinear Physical Performances in a SWARM-BOT

ASEBA, an event-based middleware for distributed robot control