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Philippe Rétornaz

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Related publications (24)

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Bringing robotics into formal education using the Thymio open source hardware robot

Francesco Mondada, Stéphane Magnenat, Michael Bonani, Philippe Rétornaz, Fanny Riedo

Mobile robots are valuable tools for education because of both the enthusiasm they raise and the multidisciplinary nature of robotics technology. Mobile robots give access to a wide range of fields, such as complex mechanics, sensors, wireless transmission ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2017

The Autonomous Photovoltaic MarXbot

Francesco Mondada, Philippe Rétornaz, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Martin Olivier Liniger

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. ...

Springer Berlin Heidelberg2013

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

Francesco Mondada, Hannes Bleuler, Michael Bonani, Stéphane Magnenat, Philippe Rétornaz

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 ...

Springer2012

Construction par procédé additif réalisée avec des robots mobiles autonomes hétérogènes

Philippe Rétornaz

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 ...

EPFL2015

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

Francesco Mondada, Philippe Rétornaz, Alexey Gribovskiy, Frank Bonnet

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 ...

Ieee2012

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

Hannes Bleuler, Philippe Rétornaz, Roger Gassert, Laura Santos Carreras

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 ...

IEEE2010

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

Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani, Stéphane Magnenat, Philippe Rétornaz, Valentin Longchamp

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 ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2011

Affordable SLAM through the Co-Design of Hardware and Methodology

Francesco Mondada, Hannes Bleuler, Paolo Germano, Michael Bonani, Stéphane Magnenat, Philippe Rétornaz, Valentin Longchamp

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 ...

IEEE Press2010

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

Pierre Dillenbourg, Francesco Mondada, Philippe Rétornaz, Séverin Lemaignan, Julia Fink, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Alain Berthoud

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 ...

2014

Cooperative navigation in robotic swarms

Francesco Mondada, Stéphane Magnenat, Michael Bonani, Philippe Rétornaz

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 ...

Springer Verlag2013

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

Francesco Mondada, Hannes Bleuler, Michael Bonani, Stéphane Magnenat, Philippe Rétornaz, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Valentin Longchamp, Daniel Burnier

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 ...

IEEE Press2010

Towards Autonomous Energy-Wise RObjects

Alcherio Martinoli, Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani, Philippe Rétornaz, Florian Christopher Vaussard

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 ...

Springer Berlin Heidelberg2011

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

Francesco Mondada, Andres Perez-Uribe, Philippe Rétornaz, Andres Upegui

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 ...

2011

Lessons Learned from Robotic Vacuum Cleaners Entering in the Home Ecosystem

Pierre Dillenbourg, Francesco Mondada, Philippe Rétornaz, Julia Fink, Florian Christopher Vaussard

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 ...

Elsevier2014

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

Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani, Stéphane Magnenat, Philippe Rétornaz

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 ...

Springer-Verlag2009

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

Francesco Mondada, Eduardo Sanchez, Andres Perez-Uribe, Philippe Rétornaz, Yann Thoma, Andres Upegui

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 ...

Springer2010

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

Francesco Mondada, Stéphane Magnenat, Philippe Rétornaz, Basilio Noris

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 ...

2008

Towards Long-Term Collective Experiments

Francesco Mondada, Michael Bonani, Philippe Rétornaz, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Steven Adriaan Roelofsen, François Rey

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 ...

Springer Berlin Heidelberg2013

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

Francesco Mondada, Philippe Rétornaz, Florian Christopher Vaussard

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 ...

Springer Berlin Heidelberg2012

A two years informal learning experience using the Thymio robot

Francesco Mondada, Philippe Rétornaz, Fanny Riedo

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 ...

Springer2012