Dario Floreano (EPFL), “Avian-Inspired Drones”

In less than 20 years drones transitioned from research labs to the real world and had a major impact on inspection, security, rescue, logistics, and entertainment. However, today’s drones do not match the agility, endurance, adaptability, and intelligence of birds. Birds are not only the masters of the sky but are also at ease on the ground and in water. Stringent aerodynamical constraints shaped their bodies and brains to leverage morphological change to adapt to diverse locomotion conditions that are still poorly understood. I will show examples of abstracting principles of avian morphological design and flight control to design agile aerial robots that can also be used to test biological hypotheses and improve our understanding of embodied intelligence in avian vertebrates.

Bio

Prof. Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Between 2010 and 2022, he was the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, a research program that graduated almost 200 PhD students and more than 100 postdocs, funded two professorships at EPFL and University of Zurich, created the EPFL Master’s program in Robotics and the annual Swiss Robotics Day,  helped launch Cybathlon, and generated more than 15 robotics  spinoffs that created several hundred jobs.

Prof. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision, an M.S. in Neural Computation, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, and at Harvard University. His research interests are Robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He served in numerous advisory boards and committees, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council, the International Society of Artificial Life, the International Neural Network Society, and in the editorial committee of several scientific journals. In addition, he helped spinning off three drone companies (senseFly.com, Flyability.com, Elythor.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org). For more information, visit his EPFL profile or Google Scholar page.

For those who are not in Berlin but would like to join virtually:
https://tu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/69207754612?pwd=IKxoTdY3dQWccHpce2nA0IsNkNxPHu.1

Photo created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.