Friday, October 31, 2025 - 3:00pm
Event Calendar Category
Other LIDS Events
Speaker Name
Dario Floreano
Affiliation
EPFL
Building and Room number
45-230
Avian-Inspired Drones
Despite remarkable progress in small flying machines, 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.
Dario Floreano is professor and director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He holds an MS in Visual Psychophysics (1988), an MS in Neural Computation (1992), and a PhD in Evolutionary Robotics (1995). He was the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics from 2010 to 2022. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He is interested in understanding and abstracting principles of embodied intelligence and morphological design from nature to create intelligent robots. He held visiting positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, at Harvard University, and at Osaka University. He co-authored more than 500 publications and 5 books, spun off several robotics companies, and is in the editorial board of several journals, including Science Robotics. He is an elected fellow of the IEEE, ELLIS, and ECLT societies.
Sponsors: A big shoutout to our sponsors, which are making this semester’s robotics seminars possible! We are pleased to have three amazing sponsors supporting the MIT Robotics Seminars this semester: Skydio, Symbotic, and Amazon. Skydio (https://www.skydio.com/) is a leader in vision-based autonomous navigation (and more!) for drones. Symbotic (https://www.symbotic.com/) is redesigning the future of warehouse automation with mobile robots (just a few miles from MIT!). Amazon (https://www.amazon.science/research-areas/robotics) is building new kinds of GenAI for robotics as they grow towards 1M deployed warehouse robots.