Philippe Rétornaz

TL;DR: It is believed that swarm robotics designers must embrace heterogeneity if they ever want swarm robotics systems to approach the complexity required of real-world systems.

TL;DR: The marXbot is presented, a miniature mobile robot that addresses the needs of collective-robotic experiments by allowing complex tasks in large environments for long durations, and has better energy management, vision, and interaction capabilities.

TL;DR: The results show that ASEBA improves the performance of the behavior with respect to other architectures, and enables advanced behavior in demanding environments using a complex robot, such as the handbot robot climbing a shelf to retrieve a book.

TL;DR: The Thymio project proposes a mature mass-produced open-hardware robot, at a low price, with a multiage and gender-neutral feature set, and with a design promoting creativity, facilitating learning, and providing a wide range of interaction possibilities from built-in behaviors to text programming.

TL;DR: This case study explores two different robot behaviors (proactive vs. reactive) and their impact on children’s interaction with the robot and the tidying behavior and shows that the proactive robot tended to encourage more playful and explorative behavior in children, whereas the reactive robot triggered more tidies behavior.