Francesco Mondada

Francesco Mondada (born 17 March 1967) is a Swiss professor^[1] in artificial intelligence and robotics. He earned 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.

Francesco Mondada
Born	Locarno, Switzerland
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

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.

Early life and education

Mondada was born in Locarno, in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, Switzerland.^[7] He grew up in a mountain village in Ticino, where his father’s mechanical workshop sparked his early passion for engineering and building things.^[8] As a teenager, he developed an interest in both mechanics and computers – at one point winning a personal computer in a lottery, which led him to start programming and interfacing his own homemade devices.^[8] This naturally evolved into building his first small robots by combining mechanical contraptions with computer control.

After finishing secondary education, Mondada chose to attend EPFL in Lausanne in 1986, specifically because it offered a “Microengineering” program (microtechnique) not available at ETH Zurich at the time.^[9] He earned his master’s degree in Microengineering at EPFL in 1991, and stayed on to pursue a doctorate. During his graduate studies, he joined the robotics research group of Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud at EPFL (Laboratory of Microinformatics, LAMI), where he worked on projects in artificial intelligence and mobile robotics alongside collaborators like Dario Floreano and Alcherio Martinoli.^[8] Mondada received his Ph.D. in 1997 from EPFL; his doctoral research included the creation of the Khepera mobile robot, a small wheeled robot platform for research, which would become one of his most celebrated achievements.^[7]

Career

Khepera and K-Team (1990s)

While still completing his Ph.D., Mondada co-designed the Khepera robot (first introduced in the early 1990s)^[10] and co-founded K-Team S.A. in 1995 to commercialize this platform.^[7] Khepera was a palm-sized desktop mobile robot equipped with sensors and a microprocessor, designed as a research tool for experiments in robotics, AI, and biology. The platform is referenced in thousands of research papers.^[11] As CEO and president of K-Team from 1995 to 2000, Mondada oversaw the production and dissemination of the Khepera robots and their accessories.^[7] The success of Khepera earned Mondada early recognition, including the Latsis award in 2005 for the best young researcher at EPFL.^[12] In 2000, Mondada stepped down from his executive role at K-Team, as the company had grown and Khepera was established in the market.

Academia and Swarm Robotics (2000s)

After leaving the industry role, Mondada returned full-time to academia at EPFL in 2000 as a senior scientist, continuing his focus on mobile robotics research.^[7] He spent a short period at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a visiting researcher around this time, then became heavily involved in European research initiatives on swarm robotics. Notably, he was a key contributor to the Swarm-Bots project (2001–2005), an EU-funded project exploring emergent collective behavior in groups of robots.^[13] Mondada served as the main designer of the project’s mobile robot, the S-Bot, which was a small autonomous robot capable of physically connecting to other robots to form larger "organisms" and cooperate on tasks.^[14] The S-Bot's innovative design and the success of the Swarm-Bots experiments led to broader recognition: in 2006, the S-Bot was highlighted as one of Wired magazine's "50 Best Robots Ever" (in a list encompassing both fictional and real robots).^[15] The Swarm-Bots project itself was showcased by the European Commission as a "FET-IST Success Story," underscoring its impact in the field.^[16]

Building on this work, Mondada continued to develop new platforms for collective robotics. In the late 2000s he introduced the marXbot,^[17] a modular all-terrain mobile robot designed for advanced swarm robotics experiments. The marXbot could be equipped with different modules (such as grippers or cameras) and featured a novel hot-swappable battery system to allow long-duration autonomous operations. It was used in the follow-up Swarmanoid project^[18] to study heterogeneous robot swarms (composed of ground robots, flying robots, etc.). Mondada’s work in this era established him as a pioneer of mechatronic design for robot collectives – designing robust, flexible robots that could operate in large groups. In 2013, EPFL appointed him as an adjunct professor of robotics.^[19]

Educational robotics and EPFL leadership (2010s–present)

From the 2010s onward, Mondada’s research interests expanded to include robotics in education and public outreach, while maintaining work in collective robotics and interdisciplinary projects. He led the development of the e-puck robot in 2005–2007, an open-source miniature robot intended for teaching engineering and embedded systems.^[20] The e-puck was designed as a hands-on educational tool for university students; it is a round, hockey-puck-sized robot with wheels, sensors (like microphones and infrared), and the ability to be programmed easily. The platform has been widely adopted in engineering classes and robotics competitions around the world, due to its open hardware design and affordability.^[21] The main scientific paper^[20] introducing the e-puck (first-authored by Mondada) has amassed over 1,200 citations,^[22] reflecting its broad use in education and research.

In 2010, Mondada co-created the Thymio robot together with collaborators from EPFL, ETH Zurich, écal and other institutions. Thymio II (the widely produced version of the robot) is a low-cost, kid-friendly educational robot designed to engage schoolchildren in programming and science.^[23] About the size of a small book, the Thymio robot comes with multiple sensors (proximity, temperature, microphones), lights, and a visual programming interface that allows children to easily program the robot's behavior.^[24] Mondada helped found the non-profit association Mobsya^[25] in 2010 to manufacture Thymio and develop its ecosystem. By 2022, Thymio had become one of the most successful educational robots globally, with over 80,000 units in use and roughly 70% of them deployed in schools outside Switzerland.^[26] Thymio is used to teach computational thinking and coding to young students, and has been praised for its open-source design and a large community that creates educational content for it.

Within EPFL, Mondada has taken on significant leadership roles in education. Since 2018, he has been the Academic Director of the Center for Learning Sciences (LEARN) at EPFL.^[27] In this role, he oversees initiatives to improve STEM education, develop new teaching tools (like educational robots), and research how students learn with technology. He also continues to head the MOBOTS^[28] research group, focusing on innovative mechatronic solutions for mobile robots and interdisciplinary applications of robotics. His recent projects have bridged robotics with fields such as biology (e.g., robots interacting with animals for behavior studies^[29]), in addition to the education mentioned above.

Awards and honours

• University Latsis^[12]
• Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching^[30]
• 2012 Polysphère, award for the best professor from the School of Engineering at EPFL, given by the students^[31]
• Member of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences^[32]
• Polytechnik-Preis (2022): Mondada received the Polytechnik-Preis (Polytechnical Prize) in 2022, becoming its first Swiss recipient.^[26] The prize, endowed by the Polytechnische Gesellschaft in Frankfurt, is one of the most significant European awards in the field of didactics (STEM education research). He was honored for the development and dissemination of the Thymio educational robot and its use in teaching computational thinking. The award includes a €50,000 prize and was presented in Frankfurt under the patronage of Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The jury highlighted the innovative pedagogical concept behind Thymio and its successful adoption in numerous schools.^[33]
• Several best poster/paper/demo awards, including Best Paper Award Design at the HRI 2017 conference

Selected publications

• F. Mondada, M. Bonani, F. Riedo, M. Briod, L. Pereyre, P. Retornaz, S. Magnenat. Bringing Robotics to Formal Education: The Thymio Open-Source Hardware Robot. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 77–85, March 2017. Bringing Robotics to Formal Education: The Thymio Open-Source Hardware Robot
• J. Halloy, G. Sempo, G. Caprari, C. Rivault, M. Asadpour, F. Tache, I. Said, V. Durier, S. Canonge, J. Ame, C. Detrain, N. Correll, A. Martinoli, F. Mondada, R. Siegwart, and J.-L. Deneubourg. Social Integration of Robots into Groups of Cockroaches to Control Self-Organized Choices. Science, 318(5853):1155-1158, 2007. - Infoscience Social Integration of Robots into Groups of Cockroaches to Control Self-Organized Choices
• F. Mondada, G. C. Pettinaro, A. Guignard, I. Kwee, D. Floreano, J.-L. Deneubourg, S. Nolfi, L. Gambardella, and M. Dorigo. SWARM-BOT: a New Distributed Robotic Concept. Autonomous Robots, special Issue on Swarm Robotics, 17(2-3):193-221, 2004. September - November 2004 Sponsor: swarm-bots, OFES 01-0012-1.
• D. Floreano and F. Mondada. Evolution of Homing Navigation in a Real Mobile Robot. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Part B : Cybernetics, 26(3):396-407, 1996.
• F. Mondada, E. Franzi, P. Ienne, T. Yoshikawa, and F. Miyazaki. Mobile Robot Miniaturization: A Tool for Investigation in Control Algorithms. In Experimental Robotics III, volume 200 of Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, pages 501-13. Springer, London, 1994.