Publications by Robert Matthew Mills

Extending Sensory Capabilities of a Biohybrid System: Prediction of Honeycomb Fill

Interactive robotics is increasingly used to investigate animal behaviour, including communication, mating and collective dynamics. An essential component for such systems is sensing the animals and the relevant aspects of the habitat to enable coherent cl ...

IEEE2025

Architecture of a decentralised decision support system for futuristic beehives

Francesco Mondada, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Robert Matthew Mills

Honeybees are essential to human society, providing pollination services globally as well as producing honey and other valuable products. Effective management of apiaries should not only rely on beekeeper knowledge and skill, but also incorporate new infor ...

2024

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

A robotic honeycomb for interaction with a honeybee colony

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak

Robotic technologies have shown the capability to interact with living organisms and even to form integrated mixed societies composed of living and artificial agents. Biocompatible robots, incorporating sensing and actuation capable of generating and respo ...

2023

A study model for reconstructing urban ecological niches

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills

The Living Arch is a study model that was designed to showcase our ongoing research into bioactive architectural systems to be inhabited by honeybees. The arch is a synergistic combination of 3D printing and active mycelia growth, created for a museum exhi ...

CRC Press2022

Bio-Hybrid Systems for Ecosystem Level Effects

Francesco Mondada, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Matthieu Jean-Michel Philippe Broisin, Martina Szopek, Jean-Louis Deneubourg

In a time marked by ecological decay and by the perspective of a severe backlash of this ecosystem decay and climate devastation onto human society, bold moves that employ novel technology to counteract this decline are required. We present a novel concept ...

MIT Press2021

Robots mediating interactions between animals for interspecies collective behaviors

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Frank Bonnet, Martina Szopek

Self-organized collective behavior has been analyzed in diverse types of gregarious animals. Such collective intelligence emerges from the synergy between individuals, which behave at their own time and spatial scales and without global rules. Recently, ro ...

2019

Social Adaptation of Robots for Modulating Self-Organization in Animal Societies

Francesco Mondada, Frank Bonnet, Robert Matthew Mills, Marcelo Elias de Oliveira

The goal of the work presented here is to influence the overall behaviour of specific animal societies by integrating computational mechatronic devices (robots) into those societies. To do so, these devices should be accepted by the animals as part of the ...

IEEE2014