Publications by Dario Floreano

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Robotic technologies, whether they are remotely operated vehicles, autonomous agents, assistive devices, or novel control interfaces, offer many promising capabilities for deployment in real‐world environments. Postdisaster scenarios are a particularly rel ...

Current drones are developed with a fixed morphology that can limit their versatility and mission capabilities. There is biological evidence that adaptive morphological changes can not only extend dynamic performances, but also provide new functionalities. In this paper, we present different drones from our recent developments where folding is used as a mean of morphological adaptation. First, we show how foldable wings can enable the transition between aerial and ground locomotion or to fly in different ae

Teleoperators rely on both visual and haptic feedback to perform drone teleoperation tasks, such as obstacle avoidance. Haptic feedback becomes essential when visual feedback is compromised, either due to visual occlusions or poor depth perception. However ...

This paper is concerned with artificial evolution of neuro-controllers with adaptive synapses for autonomous mobile robots. The method consists of encoding on the genotype a set of local modification rules that synapses obey while the robot freely moves in the environment [2]. The synaptic weights are not encoded on the genotype. In the experiments presented here, a "behavior-based fitness" function gives reproductive advantage to robots that can solve a sequential task. The results show that evolutionary a

The paper describes the results of the evolutionary development of a real, neural-network driven mobile robot. The evolutionary approach to the development of neural controllers for autonomous agents has been successfully used by many researchers, but most - if not all - studies have been carried out with computer simulations. Instead, in this research the whole evolutionary process takes places entirely on a real robot without human intervention. Although the experiments described here tackle a simple task

Optic-flow is believed to be the main source of information allowing insects to control their flight. Some researchers have tried to apply this paradigm to small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). So far, none of them has been able to demonstrate a fully autonomous flight of a free-flying system without relying on other cues such as GPS and/or some sort of orientation sensor (IMU, horizon detector, etc.). Getting back to the reactive approach suggested by Gibson (direct perception) and Braitenberg (direct con

In this paper an evolutionary method consisting of encoding a set of local adaptation rules that synapses obey while a robot freely moves in the environment is compared to standard evolution of fixed-weight control networks. The results show ha evolutionary adaptive controllers can adapt online without additional evolutionary training to strong environmental changes where instead the performance of evolutionary fixed- weight controllers is significantly degraded. Two cases are described: transfer of evolved

One of the key innovations during the evolution of life on earth has been the emergence of efficient communication systems, yet little is known about the causes and consequences of the great diversity within and between species. By conducting experimental ...

Evolutionary robotics is the attempt to develop robots through a self-organized process based on artificial evolution. This approach stresses the importance of the study of systems that have a body and that are situated in a physical environment, and which autonomously develop their own skills in close interaction with the environment. In this review we briefly illustrate the method and the main concept of evolutionary robotics, and examine the most significant contribution in this area. We also discuss som

Small-winged drones can face highly varied aerodynamic requirements, such as high manoeuvrability for flight among obstacles and high wind resistance for constant ground speed against strong headwinds that cannot all be optimally addressed by a single aero ...

We describe an evolutionary vision system capable of autonomously scanning through an image while zooming in and out and changing filtering strategy in order to perform shape discrimination. The system consists of a small artificial retina controlled by an evolutionary recurrent neural network without hidden units. We show that such a simple active-vision system can success-fully recognize different shapes independently of their position and size by dynamically exploring relevant parts of the image. We also

Evolutionary Robotics is a powerful method to generate efficient controllers with minimal human intervention, but its applicability to real-world problems remains a challenge because the method takes long time and it requires software simulations that do not necessarily transfer smoothly to physical robots. In this paper we describe a method that overcomes these limitations by evolving robots for the ability to adapt on-line in few seconds. Experiments show that this method requires less generations and sma

Centimeter-scale aquatic robots could be used in environmental monitoring, exploration, and intervention in aquatic environments. However, existing robots rely on artificial polymers and commercial electronic components, which can pollute and disrupt sensi ...

A cellular hardware implementation of a spiking neural network with run-time reconfigurable connectivity is presented. It is implemented on a compact custom FPGA board which provides a powerful reconfigurable hardware platform for hardware and software design. Complementing the system, a CPU synthesized on the FPGA takes care of interfacing the network with the external world. The FPGA board and the hardware network are demonstrated in the form of a controller embedded on the Khepera robot for a task of obs

This article presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of a soft biomimetic robotic fish based on dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) that swims by body and/or caudal fin (BCF) propulsion. BCF is a promising locomotion mechanism that potenti ...

Current advanced molecular biology techniques provide gene expression (mRNA) levels of selected genes of an organism. In such aggregate, the mRNA level of one gene is mediated by the presence of specific proteins and metabolites produced by other genes. Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) include such structures, where a node (gene) is linked to others through gene-gene interactions. The developed algorithm is a new state-of-the-art process to infer GRNs, that is to find the gene-gene relationships from experim

Coordinated flight of multiple drones allows to achieve tasks faster such as search and rescue and infrastructure inspection. Thus, pushing the State-of-the-Art of aerial swarms in navigation speed and robustness is of tremendous benefit. In particular, be ...

This paper presents a method to create fish-like robots with tensegrity systems and describes a prototype modeled on the body shape of the rainbow trout with a length of 400 mm and a mass of 102 g that is driven by a waterproof servomotor. The structure of ...

Complex visual tasks may be tackled with remarkably simple neural architectures generated by a co-evolutionary process of active vision and feature selection. This hypothesis has recently been tested in several robotic applications such as shape discrimination, car driving, indoor/outdoor navigation of a wheeled robot. Here we describe an experiment where this hypothesis is further examined in goal-oriented humanoid bipedal walking task. Hoap-2 humanoid robot equipped with a primitive vision system on its h

Dario Floreano

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The current state and future outlook of rescue robotics

Foldable Drones: from Biology to Technology

Arm-wrist haptic sleeve for drone teleoperation

Evolution of Adaptive-Synapse Controllers

Automatic Creation of an Autonomous Agent: Genetic Evolution of a Neural Network Driven Robot

Optic Flow to Steer and Avoid Collisions in 3D

Evolutionary Robotics: Coping with Environmental Change

Historical contingency affects signaling strategies and competitive abilities in evolving populations of simulated robots

Neural Synthesis of Artificial Organisms through Evolution

Bioinspired morphing wings for extended flight envelope and roll control of small drones

An Evolutionary Active-Vision System

Evolution of Plastic Control Networks

Edible aquatic robots with Marangoni propulsion

Hardware spiking neural network with run-time reconfigurable connectivity in an autonomous robot

Soft Biomimetic Fish Robot Made of Dielectric Elastomer Actuators

Active Vision and Neural Development in Animals and Robots

Scalable Reverse Engineering of Nonlinear Gene Networks

High-Speed Motion Planning for Aerial Swarms in Unknown and Cluttered Environments

Bio-Inspired Tensegrity Fish Robot

Active Vision for Goal-Oriented Humanoid Robot Walking