Publications by Dario Floreano

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Autonomous flight in confined or cluttered environments such as houses or urban canyons requires high manoeuvrability, fast mapping from sensors to actuators and very limited overall system weight. Although flying animals are well capable of coping with such situations, roboticists still have difficulties at reproducing such capabilities. This paper describes how we took inspiration from flying insects to progress toward the goal of developing small UAVs able to dynamically fly in cluttered environments. Th

A key, yet often neglected, component of digital evolution and evolutionary models is the 'selection method' which assigns fitness (number of offspring) to individuals based on their performance scores (efficiency in performing tasks). Here, we study with ...

Enactivism claims that sensory-motor activity and embodiment are crucial in perceiving the environment and that machine vision could be a much simpler business if considered in this context. However, computational models of enactive vision are very rare an ...

This paper presents a novel control strategy, which we call optiPilot, for autonomous flight in the vicinity of obstacles. Most existing autopilots rely on a complete 6-degree-of-freedom state estimation using a GPS and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) a ...

We describe a method to classify online sleep/wake states of humans based on cardiorespiratory signals for wearable applications. The method is designed to be embedded in a portable microcontroller device and to cope with the resulting tight power and weig ...

Swarms of flying robots are a promising alternative to ground-based robots for search in indoor environments with advantages such as increased speed and the ability to fly above obstacles. However, there are numerous problems that must be surmounted includ ...

In this study, a miniature artificial compound eye (15 mm in diameter) called the curved artificial compound eye (CurvACE) was endowed for the first time with hyperacuity, using similar micro-movements to those occurring in the fly's compound eye. A period ...

This paper describes the implementation and characterisation of a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) of ultra-light intelligent flying robots. The flying nature of the network makes it suitable to collect or disseminate content in urban areas or challenging ter ...

Soft robots leverage deformable bodies to achieve different types of locomotion, improve transportability, and safely navigate cluttered environments. In this context, variable-stiffness structures provide soft robots with additional properties, such as th ...

While autonomous multi-robots can achieve safe and coordinated navigation, they often struggle to adapt to unforeseen conditions and to capture operator-driven objectives in unstructured environments. We present a Virtual Reality (VR)-based shared control framework for teams of drones operating in constrained and unknown environments, enabling real-time, user-guided exploration. At the core of our approach is a novel, user-guided motion-primitive-based planner that computes continuous, collision-free trajec

Advances in soft robotics, materials science, and stretchable electronics have enabled rapid progress in soft grippers. Here, a critical overview of soft robotic grippers is presented, covering different material sets, physical principles, and device archi ...

This paper provides an overview of the SWARM-BOTS project, a robotic project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Community (IST-2000-31010). The paper illustrates the robot hardware, and the results of experimental works in which distributed adaptive controllers are designed to allow the agents to perform a variety of tasks which require cooperation and coordination among the members of a group.

Dynamic environments such as urban areas are still challenging for popular visual-inertial odometry (VIO) algorithms. Existing datasets typically fail to capture the dynamic nature of these environments, therefore making it difficult to quantitatively eval ...

The swarm intelligence paradigm has proven to have very interesting properties such as robustness, flexibility and ability to solve complex problems exploiting parallelism and self-organization. Several robotics implementations of this paradigm confirm that these properties can be exploited by the control of a population of physically independent mobile robots. We present a new robotic concept called swarmbot where the collective interaction exploited by the swarm intelligence mechanism goes beyond the cont

The ability to fly at low altitude while actively avoiding collisions with the terrain and other objects is a great challenge for small unmanned aircraft. This paper builds on top of a control strategy called optiPilot whereby a series of optic-flow detect ...

This paper describes the scientific vision and objectives of the FET Flagship candidate initiative Robot Companions for Citizens. Robot Companions will be a new generation of machines that will primarily help and assist elderly people in activities of daily living in their workplace, home and in society. They will be the ICT solution for a new sustainable welfare.

Predicting the structure of large molecular assemblies remains a challenging task in structural biology when using integrative modeling approaches. One of the main issues stems from the treatment of heterogeneous experimental data used to predict the archi ...

We aim at developing ultralight autonomous microflyers capable of freely flying within houses or small built environments while avoiding collisions. Our latest prototype is a fixed-wing aircraft weighing a mere 10 g, flying around 1.5 m/s and carrying the ...

Muscle contraction is the driving mechanism of animal movement. In contrast to biological muscles, current artificial contractile actuators are not made of biodegradable and edible because they require negative pressure or complex fabrication processes. Here we present an edible contractile actuator that can be easily fabricated and operated using positive pressure. We characterize multiple edible materials with varying softness levels and analyze their influence on the actuator's contractile motion and for

Dario Floreano

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Optic flow to control small UAVs

Selection methods regulate evolution of cooperation in digital evolution

Enactive Robot Vision

Vision-based control of near-obstacle flight

Adaptive Sleep/Wake Classification Based on Cardiorespiratory Signals for Wearable Devices

Energy-Efficient Indoor Search by Swarms of Simulated Flying Robots Without Global Information

A small-scale hyperacute compound eye featuring active eye tremor: application to visual stabilization, target tracking, and short-range odometry

Implementation of a Wireless Mesh Network of Ultra Light MAVs with Dynamic Routing

Phase Changing Materials-Based Variable-Stiffness Tensegrity Structures

Evolved swarming without positioning information: an application in aerial communication relay

Flying Together: Human-Guided Immersive Shared Control for Aerial Robot Teams in Unknown Environments

Soft Robotic Grippers

The SWARM-BOTS project

VIODE: A Simulated Dataset to Address the Challenges of Visual-Inertial Odometry in Dynamic Environments

SWARM-BOT: a New Distributed Robotic Concept

Autonomous flight at low altitude with vision-based collision avoidance and GPS-based path following

Robot Companions for Citizens

Disentangling constraints using viability evolution principles in integrative modeling of macromolecular assemblies

A 10-gram Vision-based Flying Robot

Contractile Actuators for Edible Robots