Abstract of Prof. Antonio Bicchi's talk

Talk title: From Robotics to Prosthetics and Back Again.

Abstract: 

In recent years, robotic technologies have been providing definite advances to assist people in need of physical help, including rehabilitation and prosthetics. Working in fields where humans are placed right at the center of the technology, on the other hand, is helping refocus our robotics research itself.  In prosthetics, the goal is to have an artificial limb to move naturally and intelligently enough to perform the task that users intend, without requiring their attention. By abstracting this idea, a robot of the future can be thought as a physical "prosthesis'' of its user, with sensors,

actuators, and intelligence enough to interpret and execute the user intention, translating it in a sensible action of which the user remains the owner.

In the talk I will present examples of human-robot integration, as in prosthetics and rehabilitation, augmentation with exoskeletons and supernumerary limbs, and shared-autonomy robotic avatars, with the robot executing the human's intended actions and the human perceiving the context of his/her actions and their consequences.