Prof. Antonio Bicchi will give a talk on Dec. 7th at 16:00 in Salle Minquiers.
Robots: Body, Intelligence, and Control
ABSTRACT: Modern approaches to the design of robots are changing the
way robots are built, often inspired by a philosophy of embodied
intelligence, by which many of human behaviours are deeply rooted in
the way our bodies are built. Accordingly, the physical structure of
robots is evolving from traditional rigid, heavy industrial machines
into soft bodies exhibiting new levels of versatility, adaptability,
safety, elasticity, dynamism and energy efficiency. New challenges and
opportunities arise for the control of soft robots: for instance,
carefully planning for collision avoidance may no longer be a
dominating concern, being on the contrary physical interaction with
the environment not only allowed, but even desirable to solve complex
tasks. Similarly, the traditional use of high-authority feedback loops
to control robot motion is challenged by the desire to maintain
adaptability to the environment. In this talk I will discuss how these
challenges can be addressed, at least partially, by looking at how
humans use their own bodies in similar tasks.
BIO: Antonio Bicchi is a scientist interested in Automatic Control (the
science and engineering of Systems), in Haptics (the science and
technology for the sense of Touch), and in Robotics
(i.e., the machine that is not here yet).
After graduating from the University of Bologna, he was a scientist at
MIT AI Lab in Cambridge, USA, and is now Chair of Robotics at the
University of Pisa. Since 2009 he leads the Soft Robotics Lab at the
Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, and from 2013 he is adjunct
Professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
His 2012-2017 ERC Advanced Grant “SoftHands” established the basis
for the theory of soft synergies in human and robot hands, which led to
the design of revolutionary robotic and prosthetic hands.
