Publications by Philippe Rétornaz

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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. ...

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 ...

This thesis lies at the crossroad of three research fields: heterogenous mobile collective robotics, autonomous construction with mobile robots and 3D printing. The main goal of this work is to implement and study an innovative way to interact and modify t ...

During traditional open procedures, surgeons directly palpate tissues before dissecting them. In this way, they can avoid the accidental damage of hidden arteries that can lead to fatal hemorrhage. New Minimally Invasive Surgical (MIS) techniques progressi ...

A robot accepted by animals as conspecifics is a very powerful tool in behavioral biology, particularly in studies of gregarious animals. In this paper we present a robotic zebrafish designed for experiments on the collective animal behavior. The robot con ...

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 ...

We present the design approach and evaluation of our proto- type called “Ranger”. Ranger is a robotic toy box that aims to motivate young children to tidy up their room. We evalu- ated Ranger in 14 families with 31 children (2-10 years) using the Wizard-of ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This article considers the suitability of current robots designed to assist humans in accomplishing their daily domestic tasks. With several million units sold worldwide, robotic vacuum cleaners are currently the figurehead in this field. As such, we will ...

We present a novel approach to mobile object manipulation for service in indoor environments. Current research in service robotics focus on single robots able to move, manipulate objects, and transport them to various locations. Our approach differs by tak ...

This paper presents the final hardware platform developed in the Perplexus project. This platform is composed of a reconfigurable device called the ubichip, which is embedded on a pervasive platform called the ubidule, and can also be integrated on the mar ...

Swarm robotics in real world requires a large number of robots and thus enough room for experimentation. Therefore, to implement such experiments with limited budget, robots should be compact and low cost, which entails the use of microcontroller-based min ...

It is often challenging to manage the battery supply when dealing with a fleet of mobile robots during long experiments. If one uses classical recharge stations, then agents are immobilized during the whole recharge process. In this study, we present a nov ...

The market of domestic service robots, and especially vacuum cleaners, has kept growing during the past decade. According to the International Federation of Robotics, more than 1 million units were sold worldwide in 2010. Currently, there is no in-depth an ...

Technology is playing an increasing role in our society. Therefore it becomes important to educate the general public, and young generations in particular, about the most common technologies. In this context, robots are excellent education tools, for many ...

Philippe Rétornaz

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The Autonomous Photovoltaic MarXbot

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

Construction par procédé additif réalisée avec des robots mobiles autonomes hétérogènes

Design and Psychophysical Evaluation of a Tactile Pulse Display for Teleoperated Artery Palpation

Development of a mobile robot to study the collective behavior of zebrafish

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

Affordable SLAM through the Co-Design of Hardware and Methodology

Which Robot Behavior Can Motivate Children to Tidy up Their Toys? Design and Evaluation of "Ranger"

Cooperative navigation in robotic swarms

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

Towards Autonomous Energy-Wise RObjects

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

Lessons Learned from Robotic Vacuum Cleaners Entering in the Home Ecosystem

The Hand-bot, a Robot Design for Simultaneous Climbing and Manipulation

Ubichip, Ubidule, and MarXbot: A Hardware Platform for the Simulation of Complex Systems

Scripting the swarm: event-based control of microcontroller-based robots

Towards Long-Term Collective Experiments

Cutting Down the Energy Consumed by Domestic Robots: Insights from Robotic Vacuum Cleaners

A two years informal learning experience using the Thymio robot

Seamless Multi-Robot Programming for the People: ASEBA and the Wireless Thymio II Robot