Francesco Mondada | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | Swiss |
Citizenship | Switzerland |
Alma mater | Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne |
Known for | Khepera mobile robot, E-puck mobile robot, Thymio |
Awards | Latsis Foundation University Prize, Credit Suisse Best Teaching Award |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Robotics, Computer Science |
Institutions | Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne |
Francesco Mondada (born 17 March 1967) is a Swiss professor [1] in artificial intelligence and robotics. He got a Master's degree in Microengineering at the EPFL in 1991 and a PhD degree in 1997. He is one of the creators of the Khepera and directed the design of the S-bot, the e-puck, the marXbot and the Thymio mobile robots. Together, these robots are mentioned in more than 9000 research articles. [2] In particular the Khepera robot [3] is a milestone in the field of bio-inspired and evolutionary robotics.
He was one of the founders and director of K-team SA from its creation 1995 to 2000, [4] and one of the founders of Calerga Sarl in 2001 [5] and Mobsya in 2010. [6]
His recent work concerns collective robotics and education.
EPFL is a public research university in Lausanne, Switzerland. Established in 1969, it has placed itself as a public research university specializing in engineering and natural sciences.
Jean-Daniel Nicoud, is a Swiss computer scientist, noted for inventing of a computer mouse with an optical encoder and the CALM.
The Khepera is a small (5.5 cm) differential wheeled mobile robot that was developed at the LAMI laboratory of Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud at EPFL in the mid 1990s. It was developed by Edo. Franzi, Francesco Mondada, André Guignard and others.
The s-bot is a small (15 cm) differential wheeled mobile robot developed at the LIS at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland between 2001 and 2004. Targeted to swarm robotics, a field of artificial intelligence, it was developed within the Swarm-bots project, a Future and Emerging Technologies project coordinated by Prof. Marco Dorigo. Built by a small team of engineers of the group of Prof. Dario Floreano and with the help of student projects, it is considered at the time of completion as one of the most complex and featured robots ever for its size. The s-bot was ranked on position 39 in the list of “The 50 Best Robots Ever” by the Wired magazine in 2006.
André Guignard is a Swiss engineer initially educated as a watchmaker. He is the creator of the mechanic of the Khepera, the S-bot and several other mobile robots.
Dario Floreano is a Swiss-Italian roboticist and engineer. He is Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent System (LIS) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and was the founding director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics.
Evolutionary robotics is an embodied approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in which robots are automatically designed using Darwinian principles of natural selection. The design of a robot, or a subsystem of a robot such as a neural controller, is optimized against a behavioral goal. Usually, designs are evaluated in simulations as fabricating thousands or millions of designs and testing them in the real world is prohibitively expensive in terms of time, money, and safety.
Mordechai (Moti) Ben-Ari is a professor emeritus of computer science education at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Martin Vetterli was president of École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, succeeding Patrick Aebischer. He's a professor of engineering and was formerly the president of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Webots is a free and open-source 3D robot simulator used in industry, education and research.
Reymond Clavel is director of the Laboratoire de Systèmes Robotiques 2 (LSRO2) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. He is one of the pioneers in the development of parallel robots, and the inventor of the notable Delta robot. His interest in research and his teaching are related mostly to robotics, micro-robotics and high precision mechanisms. His main domains of expertise are:
The Lausanne campus or Dorigny university campus is a large area in Switzerland where the University of Lausanne (UNIL), the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and several other institutions are located. It is in Dorigny, towards the west of Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva. The site is about 2.2 kilometres wide and 31,000 people study and work there.
The Health Valley covers the Western Switzerland region, where the life sciences sector extends from Geneva to Bern, including the seven cantons of Bern, Fribourg, Geneva, Jura, Neuchâtel, Valais and Vaud. This cluster presents a critical mass of 1,000 companies, research centers and innovation support structures, representing today more than 25,000 employees. The Health Valley strives to animate the life sciences ecosystem of the region, by establishing thriving bridges between its ambassadors.
Alcherio Martinoli is a roboticist and an associate professor at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering where he heads the Distributed Systems and Algorithms Laboratory.
Swarm robotic platforms apply swarm robotics in multi-robot collaboration. They take inspiration from nature. The main goal is to control a large number of robots to accomplish a common task/problem. Hardware limitation and cost of robot platforms limit current research in swarm robotics to mostly performed by simulation software. On the other hand, simulation of swarm scenarios that needs large numbers of agents is extremely complex and often inaccurate due to poor modelling of external conditions and limitation of computation.
Sabine Hauert is Professor of Swarm Engineering in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of Bristol where her research investigates swarm robotics. Previously she worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
Erna Hamburger was a Swiss engineer and professor. In 1957, she became professor of electrometry at the University of Lausanne. She was the first woman in the history of Switzerland to be named a professor at a STEM university.
SwissCovid is a COVID-19 contact tracing app used for digital contact tracing in Switzerland. Use of the app is voluntary and based on a decentralized approach using Bluetooth Low Energy and Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (dp3t).
Paola Viganò, is an Italian architect and urbanist, currently professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and at the University of Venice (IUAV).
Alfred Stucky was a Swiss engineer and academic who worked on hydraulic dam designs, specialising in arch dams. He founded the engineering firm Stucky SA in 1926; based in Renens in Switzerland, it has been part of the Gruner AG group since 2013.