Towards Edible Robots and Robotic Food

Abstract

Nowadays food is often processed, manufactured, and delivered by robots. But what if those robots were edible too? In this talk, the speaker will present recent work towards making soft robot components out of edible materials: bodies, sensors, actuators, batteries, connectors, and even logic circuits. Future edible robots will not only carry out work, as normal robots do, but they will also serve a nutritional role at the end of their lifetime or completely and safely degrade in the environment. In addition, edible robotic components can also be purposed to animate food for new dining experiences, potentially reduce food waste in farming, and serve as interactive food for pets. The speaker will illustrate his talk with several examples of edible robots and robotic food.

About the Speaker

Prof. Dario FLOREANO is Professor of Intelligent Systems at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. From 2010 to 2022, he was the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics that graduated more than 200 PhD students and spun off 15 robotics companies that generated hundreds of deep-tech jobs.

Prof. Floreano has a multi-disciplinary training in visual psychophysics, neural computation, and robotics; he made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He held visiting research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Caltech/JPL, Harvard University, and Osaka University, and currently holds a Senior Visiting Fellowship of HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Studies at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

Prof. Floreano has co-authored almost 600 publications and 5 books, spun off 6 robotics companies, and is on the editorial board of several journals, including Science Robotics. He is a Fellow of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, of the European Labs for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and of the European Center for Living Technologies. He is, or has been, on the Advisory Board of the International Neural Network Society, the International Artificial Life Society, the World Economic Forum General Agenda Council, the Future and Emerging Technologies Program of the European Commission, the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the ELLIS AI Institute in Germany, and of the Robotics Institute of HKUST.

For Attendees' Attention

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