Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - 4:00pm to Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - 3:55pm
Event Calendar Category
LIDS Seminar Series
Speaker Name
Dario Floreano
Affiliation
EPFL
Building and Room number
32-141
Abstract
I will give an overview of my research in bio-mimetic drones for flight in confined spaces in safe interaction with humans. I will start by presenting miniature and small-size robots capable of performing collision-free flight and altitude control by means of insect-inspired sensors and on-board artificial intelligence. I will then show examples of how drones could change morphology to perform multiple types of locomotion, and I will conclude by describing novel design of flying robots capable of surviving and exploiting collisions in order to explore extremely cluttered environments in poor visibility conditions.
Biography
Prof. Dario Floreano is Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL and Director of the Swiss National Center of Robotics, a national strategic initiative bringing together all major robotics labs in Switzerland. His research focuses on the convergence of biology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. He published more than 300 articles with an H-index of 53, and four books on evolutionary robotics, bio-inspired artificial intelligence, and bio-mimetic flying robots with MIT Press and Springer Verlag. He has been a founding member of the World Economic Forum Council on robotics and smart devices, co-founder of the International Society of Artificial Life, Inc. (USA), co-founder the drone company senseFly Ltd (now part of the Parrot Group), member of the editorial board of 10 professional journals, and board member of numerous professional societies in robotics and artificial intelligence. Prof. Floreano is also very active in the public understanding of robotics: beside delivering almost 200 invited talks worldwide, organizing many robotics shows, and featuring on the most important international media, he started the popular robotics podcast Talking Robots, which has grown into RoboHub.org, the most widely consulted robotics portal in the world. Prof. Floreano has been listed for two consecutive years in the Swiss press as one of the 300 most influential persons in Switzerland.