Publication

Robotic manipulation to investigate the physical principles of biological self-organization

Publications associées (31)

A Biohybrid Superorganism - Investigating honeybees' collective behaviors via interactive robotics

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where the collaborative efforts of "simple" individuals can lead to the emergence of complex dynamics. The reliance of each organism on the collective is so great t ...

EPFL2024

Targeted worker removal reveals a lack of flexibility in brood transport specialisation with no compensatory gain in efficiency

Laurent Keller, Mahmut Selman Sakar, Fazil Emre Uslu

Division of labour is widely thought to increase the task efficiency of eusocial insects. Workers can switch their task to compensate for sudden changes in demand, providing flexible task allocation. In combination with automated tracking technology, we de ...

Nature Research2024

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Raphael Cherfan

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...

2024

Resolving bacterial cell biology: from replisome dynamics to cell wall synthesis

Chen Zhang

Bacteria are ubiquitous single cellular organisms. Compared to eukaryotic cells, bacteria have two unique characteristics: the membrane-less nucleoid and the cell wall built of peptidoglycan (PG). In most bacteria, a single circular chromosome is compacted ...

EPFL2024

Educational Soft Underwater Robot with an Electromagnetic Actuation

Robert Marius Hennig

As demonstrated by the Soft Robotics Toolkit Platform, compliant robotics pose an exciting educational opportunity. Underwater robotics using soft undulating fins is an expansive research topic with applications such as exploration of underwater life or re ...

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc2024

Soft Robotics: A Route to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity in Robotics

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes

Robotics is entering our daily lives. The discipline is increasingly crucial in fields such as agriculture, medicine, and rescue operations, impacting our food, health, and planet. At the same time, it is becoming evident that robotic research must embrace ...

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc2024

Fluorescent fatty acid conjugates for live cell imaging of peroxisomes

Luc Reymond, Manon Sandra Bardyn, Fabien Kuttler, Daria Korotkova, Triana Amen, Milena Maria Schuhmacher

Peroxisomes are eukaryotic organelles that are essential for multiple metabolic pathways, including fatty acid oxidation, degradation of amino acids, and biosynthesis of ether lipids. Consequently, peroxisome dysfunction leads to pediatric-onset neurodegen ...

Nature Research2024

Avoidance of Concave Obstacles Through Rotation of Nonlinear Dynamics

Aude Billard, Lukas Huber

Controlling complex tasks in robotic systems, such as circular motion for cleaning or following curvy lines, can be dealt with using nonlinear vector fields. This article introduces a novel approach called the rotational obstacle avoidance method (ROAM) fo ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Memento Mori: Reliable robustness in self-reconfigurable modular robots

Kevin Andrew Holdcroft

Modular robotics link the reliability of a centralised system with the adaptivity of a decentralised system. It is difficult for a robot with a fixed shape to be able to perform many different types of tasks. As the task space grows, the number of functi ...

EPFL2024

Small-scale robotic devices for medical interventions in the brain

Lorenzo Francesco John Noseda, Mahmut Selman Sakar

This article summarizes the recent advancements in the design, fabrication, and control of microrobotic devices for the diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders. With a focus on diverse actuation methods, we discuss how advancements in materials science ...

2024

Investigating neural resource allocation in the sensorimotor control of extra limbs

Giulia Dominijanni

The rise of robotic body augmentation brings forth new developments that will transform robotics, human-machine interaction, and wearable electronics. Extra robotic limbs, although building upon restorative technologies, bring their own set of challenges i ...

EPFL2024

Robot Learning using Tensor Networks

Suhan Narayana Shetty

In various robotics applications, the selection of function approximation methods greatly influences the feasibility and computational efficiency of algorithms. Tensor Networks (TNs), also referred to as tensor decomposition techniques, present a versatile ...

EPFL2024

Filiform Variable Stiffness Technologies for Medical Robotics

Yegor Piskarev

In recent years, soft robotics has surged in applications like wearables, drones, smart fabrics, and medical instruments. Due to their compliance, these devices excel in tasks demanding dexterity and adaptability, such as manipulation, locomotion, crash re ...

EPFL2024

Long live(d) CsPbBr3 superlattices: colloidal atomic layer deposition for structural stability

Raffaella Buonsanti, Alexander Nicolas Chen, Philippe Benjamin Green, Victoria Lapointe

Superlattice formation afforded by metal halide perovskite nanocrystals has been a phenomenon of interest due to the high structural order induced in these self-assemblies, an order that is influenced by the surface chemistry and particle morphology of the ...

Royal Soc Chemistry2024

Colloidal self-assembly of soft neural interfaces from injectable photovoltaic microdevices

Mahmut Selman Sakar, Murat Kaynak, Zhangjun Huang, Haiyan Jia

Biomimetic retinas with a wide field of view and high resolution are in demand for neuroprosthetics and robot vision. Conventional neural prostheses are manufactured outside the application area and implanted as a complete device using invasive surgery. He ...

2023

An Autonomous Robotic Platform to Manipulate Collective Behavior in Ants

Matthias Rüegg

Eusocial life is characterized by division of labour, collective decision making and self organization, and regarded as the highest form of social organisation in groups. Ants are a model organism for research in collective behavior and the evolution of eu ...

EPFL2023

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction: An Explorative Path to Foster Complex Systems Understanding

Hala Khodr

Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...

EPFL2023

Grand canonical Brownian dynamics simulations of adsorption and self-assembly of SAS-6 rings on a surface

Pierre Gönczy, Niccolo Banterle

The Spindle Assembly Abnormal Protein 6 (SAS-6) forms dimers, which then self-assemble into rings that are critical for the nine-fold symmetry of the centriole organelle. It has recently been shown experimentally that the self-assembly of SAS-6 rings is st ...

AIP Publishing2023

Multi-Source Fusion for Voxel-Based 7-DoF Grasping Pose Estimation

Fei Wang, Zheng Dang

In this work, we tackle the problem of 7-DoF grasping pose estimation(6-DoF with the opening width of parallel-jaw gripper) from point cloud data, which is a fundamental task in robotic manipulation. Most existing methods adopt 3D voxel CNNs as the backbon ...

IEEE2023

Improving hand prosthesis control with advanced single-finger proportional decoding and robotic shared control

Vincent Alexandre Mendez

Myoelectric prostheses allow users to recover lost functionality by controlling a robotic device with their remaining muscle activity. Commercial devices usually use a two-recording-channel system placed on specific muscles to control a single degree of fr ...

EPFL2023