Event Information

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar: Dario Floreano, "Biologically Inspired Drones" Friday, April 13, 2018 2:00 p.m. 1146 A.V. Williams Building For More Information: Ania Picard 301 405 4358 appicard@umd.edu Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar Biologically Inspired Drones Dario Floreano Full Professor Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems  Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics Abstract We are witnessing the advent of a new era of drones that can autonomously fly in natural and man-made environments. These robots will have help in many civilian tasks, including transportation, communication, agriculture, disaster mitigation and environment preservation. However, autonomous flight in confined spaces and near humans presents great scientific and technical challenges owing to the perceptual intelligence required to negotiate complex environments and to the safety requirements. In this context, flying organisms provide a rich source of inspiration. In this talk I will show biologically-inspired design principles and soft robotics technologies that can improve the perceptual, mechanical, and functional capabilities as well as the safety of drones. Host  Mumu Xu Biography Professor Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). He is also founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, which sponsors almost 60 researchers in 20 labs across Switzerland. Prof. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision, an M.S. in Neural Computation, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, and at Harvard University. His main research interests are robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano has made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics that have been published in almost 400 peer-reviewed articles, and 4 books on Artificial Neural Networks, Evolutionary Robotics, Bio-inspired Artificial Intelligence and Bio-inspired Flying Robots with MIT Press and Springer Verlag. He served in several advisory boards and committees, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council, the International Society of Artificial Life, the International Neural Network Society, and in the editorial committee of ten scientific journal. In addition, he helped spinning off two drone companies (senseFly and Flyability) and a non-for-profit communication platform on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub).