From Flying Animals to Drones and Back

Abstract

Drones have taken the world by storm. In the past 15 years, small autonomous flyers have had major impact in inspection, security, rescue, logistics, and entertainment. However, today's commercial drones cannot yet compete with flying animals in terms of mechanical resilience, adaptability, and cooperation. For example, multi-copters are very agile, but spend most of their energy to fight gravity; in contrast, winged drones offer almost twice as much endurance than multi-copters for the same mass, but require more space and time to change direction. The speaker will describe recent research addressing these challenges that take inspiration from insects and birds, describe how such drones can be used to explain poorly understood biological mechanisms, and show examples of translation into commercial products. Finally, the speaker will point out open challenges in design, modeling, and control of future drone systems. 

About the Speaker

Prof. Dario FLOREANO is full professor and director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He has helped to grow and shape the Swiss robotics ecosystem with the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics from 2010 to 2022. He has made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. His research interests include understanding the principles of embodied AI from nature and developing bio-inspired robotic systems.

Prof. Floreano has multi-disciplinary training in visual psychophysics, neural computation, and robotics. He has held visiting research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Caltech/JPL, and Harvard University. He has co-authored more than 500 publications and five books by MIT Press and Springer Verlag, spun off three drone companies (senseFly, Flyability, Elythor), and serves on the editorial board of several journals, including Science Robotics.

Prof. Floreano has received numerous awards and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Robotics and Automation Society, the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and the European Center for Living Technology. He also currently serves as an Advisor Board Member for the ELLIS Tübingen Institute for Machine Learning and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.

For Attendees' Attention

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