Francesco Mondada - Böcker

Robotic animals are nowadays developed for various types of research, such as bio-inspired robotics, biomimetics and animal behavior studies. More specifically, in the case of collective animal behavior research, the robotic device can interact with animals by generating and exploiting signals relevant for social behavior. Once perceived by the animal society as conspecific, these robots can become powerful tools to study the animal behaviors, as they can at the same time monitor the changes in behavior and influence the collective choices of the animal society.In this book, we present novel robotized tools that can integrate shoals of fish in order to study their collective behaviors. We used the current state of the art on the zebrafish social behavior to define the specifications of the robots, and we performed stimuli analysis to improve their developments. Bio-inspired controllers were designed based on data extracted from experiments with zebrafish for the robots to mimic the zebrafish locomotion underwater. Experiments involving mixed groups of fish and robots qualified the robotic system to be integrated among a zebrafish shoal and to be able to influence the collective decisions of the fish. These results are very promising for the field of animal-robot interaction studies, as we showed the effect of the robots in long-duration experiments and repetitively, with the same order of response from the animals.

Robotic animals are nowadays developed for various types of research, such as bio-inspired robotics, biomimetics and animal behavior studies. More specifically, in the case of collective animal behavior research, the robotic device can interact with animals by generating and exploiting signals relevant for social behavior. Once perceived by the animal society as conspecific, these robots can become powerful tools to study the animal behaviors, as they can at the same time monitor the changes in behavior and influence the collective choices of the animal society.In this book, we present novel robotized tools that can integrate shoals of fish in order to study their collective behaviors. We used the current state of the art on the zebrafish social behavior to define the specifications of the robots, and we performed stimuli analysis to improve their developments. Bio-inspired controllers were designed based on data extracted from experiments with zebrafish for the robots to mimic the zebrafish locomotion underwater. Experiments involving mixed groups of fish and robots qualified the robotic system to be integrated among a zebrafish shoal and to be able to influence the collective decisions of the fish. These results are very promising for the field of animal-robot interaction studies, as we showed the effect of the robots in long-duration experiments and repetitively, with the same order of response from the animals.

Medical and Service Robotics integrate the most recent achievements in mechanics, mechatronics, computer science, haptic and teleoperation devices together with adaptive control algorithms.The book  includes topics such as surgery robotics, assist devices, rehabilitation technology, surgical instrumentation and Brain-Machine Interface (BMI) as examples for medical robotics. Autonomous cleaning, tending, logistics, surveying and rescue robots, and elderly and healthcare robots are typical examples of topics from service robotics. This is the Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Medical and Service Robots, held in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2014. It presents an overview of current research directions and fields of interest. It is divided into three sections, namely 1) assistive and rehabilitation devices; 2) surgical robotics; and 3) educational and service robotics. Most contributions are strongly anchored on collaborations between technical and medical actors, engineers, surgeons and clinicians. Biomedical robotics and the rapidly growing service automation fields have clearly overtaken the “classical” industrial robotics and automatic control centered activity familiar to the older generation of roboticists.

This open access book bridges the gap between playing with robots in school and studying robotics at the upper undergraduate and graduate levels to prepare for careers in industry and research. Robotic algorithms are presented formally, but using only mathematics known by high-school and first-year college students, such as calculus, matrices and probability. Concepts and algorithms are explained through detailed diagrams and calculations.Elements of Robotics presents an overview of different types of robots and the components used to build robots, but focuses on robotic algorithms: simple algorithms like odometry and feedback control, as well as algorithms for advanced topics like localization, mapping, image processing, machine learning and swarm robotics. These algorithms are demonstrated in simplified contexts that enable detailed computations to be performed and feasible activities to be posed. Students who study these simplified demonstrations will be well prepared for advanced study of robotics.The algorithms are presented at a relatively abstract level, not tied to any specific robot. Instead a generic robot is defined that uses elements common to most educational robots: differential drive with two motors, proximity sensors and some method of displaying output to the user.The theory is supplemented with over 100 activities, most of which can be successfully implemented using inexpensive educational robots. Activities that require more computation can be programmed on a computer. Archives are available with suggested implementations for the Thymio robot and standalone programs in Python.

1 With its fourth edition, the ANTS series of workshops has changed its name. Theoriginal"ANTS-FromAntColoniestoArti?cialAnts:InternationalWo- shop on Ant Algorithms" has become "ANTS - International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence". This change is mainly due to the following reasons. First, the term "ant algorithms" was slower in spreading in the research community than the term "swarm intelligence", while at the sametime research inso-calledswarm robotics wasthesubjectofincreasingactivity:itwastherefore an obvious choice to substitute the term ant algorithms with the more accepted and used term swarm intelligence. Second, although swarm intelligence research has undoubtedly produced a 2 number of interesting and promising research directions , we think it is fair to say that its most successful strand is the one known as "ant colony optimi- tion".Ant colony optimization, ?rst introducedin the early1990sasa noveltool fortheapproximatesolutionofdiscreteoptimizationproblems,hasrecentlyseen an explosion in the number of its applications, both to academic and real-world problems, and is currently being extended to the realm of continuous optimi- tion (a few papers on this subject being published in these proceedings).It is therefore a reasonable choice to have the term ant colony optimization as part of the workshop name.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL'99, held in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 1999. The 90 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 150 submissions. The book presents the state of the art in ALife research. It is divided in topical sections on epistemology; evolutionary cybernetics; bio-inspired robotics and autonomous agents; self-replication, self-maintenance, and gene expression; societies and collective behavior; and communication and language.

Distributed robotics is a rapidly growing, interdisciplinary research area lying at the intersection of computer science, communication and control systems, and electrical and mechanical engineering. The goal of the Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS) is to exchange and stimulate research ideas to realize advanced distributed robotic systems.This volume of proceedings includes 43 original contributions presented at the Tenth International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS 2010), which was held in November 2010 at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. The selected papers in this volume are authored by leading researchers from Asia, Europa, and the Americas, thereby providing a broad coverage and perspective of the state-of-the-art technologies, algorithms, system architectures, and applications in distributed robotic systems. The book is organized into four parts, each representing one critical and long-term research thrust in the multi-robot community: distributed sensing (Part I); localization, navigation, and formations (Part II); coordination algorithms and formal methods (Part III); modularity, distributed manipulation, and platforms (Part IV).