Antonio Bicchi (University of Pisa & Italian Institute of Technology, Italy)
The Quest for Natural Machine Motion
We do not know how robots of the future will look like, but both the layman and the expert agree that they will not be like the heavy, rigid machines we have seen moving clumsily and somewhat menacingly in the past. Many researchers are indeed focusing on how to build softer robots which can move naturally around in an environment shared with humans.
Gentleness and strength, safety and efficiency, capability and adaptability, smoothness and effectiveness are the contradictory goals that such a naturally moving machine should achieve. In this talk, I will discuss how new materials and design approaches, new sensors and actuators, new control approaches, and new human-robot interfaces can enable the next generation of robots for assisting and cooperating with humans.
Bio: Antonio Bicchi is Senior Scientist with the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa and Professor of Robotics at the University of Pisa. He graduated from the University of Bologna in 1988 and was a postdoc scholar at MIT AI Lab in 1988–1991. His main research interests are in Robotics, Haptics, and Control Systems. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and has organized the first WorldHaptics Conference (WHC'05). He co-chaired the Int. Symp. on Robotics Research (ISRR'15), and the Program Committee of the Int. Conf. Robotics and Automation (ICRA'16). He is the recipient of several awards and honors, including an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for his research on human and robot hands.
Antonio Bicchi (University of Pisa & Italian Institute of Technology, Italy)
The Quest for Natural Machine Motion
We do not know how robots of the future will look like, but both the layman and the expert agree that they will not be like the heavy, rigid machines we have seen moving clumsily and somewhat menacingly in the past. Many researchers are indeed focusing on how to build softer robots which can move naturally around in an environment shared with humans.