Eco-socio-botics 2022: Social Robotics for sustainability
Workshop, 16th December 2022
organized by
Ilaria Alfieri, Antonio Fleres, Luisa Damiano
A satellite workshop of the International Conference of Social Robotics 2022 (ICSR2022), 13-16 December 2022
Talk Details:
Bioinspiration: an approach to sustainability in roboticsEmanuela Del Dottore
Researcher in Bioinspired Soft Robotics at IIT, Genoa
Abstract
Bioinspiration is a long-lasting approach increasingly adopted in robotics to inspire novel, emerging technologies and robotic systems expected to interact more safely with natural unstructured environments and living beings, better dealing with uncertain and dynamic conditions. On the other hand, the bioinspired approach consents to deepen knowledge about natural processes and systems, with the additional effect of improving awareness and sustainability.
In this talk, I will provide a few examples of bioinspired systems towards a sustainable robotics vision, with enhanced dynamic adaptation in exploration tasks for application in agriculture, space, or Earth exploration and monitoring. In particular, plants' structural and functional properties, and their energy-saving strategies to move across unknown and challenging environments through adaptive growth, make them a unique, novel model for roboticists. Plants explore and colonize their surroundings, overtaking obstacles and moving in complex scenes, like roots in the soil or cluttered environments on the aerial side. They elaborate on many different chemical and physical signals from the outside. As a response, they display a series of growth-driven movements and decision-making strategies whose engineering translation has proven to enable new abilities for improved motion and exploration of bio-inspired growing robots.
Keynote speaker's short bio
Dr. Emanuela Del Dottore is a Researcher in Bioinspired Soft Robotics at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Italy. With a background in Computer Science (University of Pisa) and a Ph.D. in Biorobotics (cum laude, from Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Pisa), she works on developing control and decision-making strategies for bioinspired robots based on plants growth behaviors. Dr. Del Dottore has contributed to writing successful regional and international project proposals and participated in their development. These include, for instance, FET-OPEN FP7-ICT PLANTOID (G.A. 293431), FET-PROACT GROWBOT (G.A. 824074), ERC I-WOOD, POR FESR Toscana SMASH. She is a co-advisor of several Ph.D. students, fellows, research interns, and postdocs working in plant-inspired robotics, growing robots, and soft robotics. Dr. Del Dottore currently analyzes plant behaviors to implement plant-inspired computational models useful for multi-agent systems distributed control and communication. She aims to extract functional rules from natural living systems and implement similar functionalities to enable efficient compliance and adaptation in robotic artifacts to explore and monitor unstructured and mutable environments.
