Brain-Inspired Robotics Laboratory

🎄✨ It is holiday season at our lab! Even our robots are ready to take a well-deserved break after all their hard work this year. Wishing everyone a joyful and restful holiday!

How can #MachineLearning help controlling #Continuum #SoftRobots? What is the impact of their modeling? Learning-based controllers for Soft Robots can be trained through experience, exploiting various forward models that differ in physical assumptions, accuracy, and computational cost. In our last paper, a unique characterization of learning-based policies is offered, emphasizing the impact of forward models on the control problem and how the state of the art evolves. This leads to the presented perspectives outlining current challenges and future research trends for machine-learning applications within Soft Robotics. Congratulations to all the authors for their precious contribution to the field! Egidio Falotico, Enrico Donato, Carlo Alessi, Elisa Setti, Muhammad Sunny Nazeer, Camilla Agabiti, Daniele Caradonna, Diego Bianchi, Francesco Piqué, Yasmin Ansari, Marc Killpack You can find the full text at this link: https://lnkd.in/d6-8aqeg

No better way to learn than by doing! 🪛🔧 Today, our friends at the Brain-Inspired Robotics Laboratory and SMB Lab joined us for a small workshop on smart textiles led by our post-doc Sophie Skach: with a bit of DIY, PhD students and young researchers learnt the basics to realize soft pneumatic actuators, which are incredibly appealing when aiming for "gentle" human-robot interaction 🤝 It's always worth sharing skills, helping our community to grow! #research #textilerobotics #softrobotics #smarttextiles #skillsharing #workshop

Excited to have been part of the recent #PROBOSCIS Plenary Meeting! 🚀 It was an amazing opportunity to engage with our project partners, exchange ideas, and foster innovative, multi-disciplinary discussions around soft robotics, bioinspiration, and cutting-edge research. We are looking forward to sharing our exciting results with the community and contributing to the next steps of this incredible journey. A special thanks to all the participants and organizers for making this event both insightful and productive. Let’s continue to push the boundaries of innovation together! #PROBOSCIS #EUproject #Research #H2020 #Soft #Robotics #IIT #Unige #SSSA #HUJI #PHC

🌱 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀! 🤖 How can plants inspire breakthroughs in robotics? We are eager to host Dr. Emanuela Del Dottore from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, who will deliver the inspirational session titled "Plant Intelligence: A New Paradigm for the Design of Explorative Robots". 📅 Date: 𝗢𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟱, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰 🕒 Time: 𝟮𝗣𝗠 𝗖𝗘𝗦𝗧 📍 Location: 𝗥𝗼𝗼𝗺 𝟯, 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗶𝗼𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘂𝘁𝗲 - 𝗣𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗮 (𝗜𝘁𝗮𝗹𝘆) During this talk, we will explore the fascinating world of plant-inspired robotics, where the adaptive and intelligent behaviors of plants guide the design of next-generation robots. Discover how plant growth mechanisms can be harnessed to create robots capable of navigating and thriving in unstructured environments. This seminar delves into the intersection of biology and robotics, unveiling new models for robot control, innovative applications in environmental monitoring, and strategies to enhance robot performance with plant-inspired movements. 𝗪𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗷𝗼𝗶𝗻 𝘂𝘀? 🤯 #Robotics #Biorobotics #SoftRobotics #Plants #Intelligence #Innovation #Research

🚀 Excited to share that we recently hosted the "Sensorimotor Representation: Advancements in Learning Models for Robots" workshop at BioRob24, Heidelberg. A big shoutout to our amazing speakers who brought their expertise and insights to the table—your contributions made the workshop a true success! Chiara Bartolozzi Yulia Sandamirskaya Pablo Lanillos Mehdi Khamassi Martin Butz. And of course, a huge thank you to Egidio Falotico and Matej Hoffmann for their incredible support in bringing this event to life. 🙌 The event was a deep dive into some of the most pressing questions in the fields of AI, computational neuroscience, and robotics: 1. How can robots learn and represent sensory information in unstructured environments? 🌍 2. What are the most effective methodologies for integrating sensory representation and motor control? 🤖 3. How can insights from human neural processes be replicated in robots? 🧠 4. What role do cognitive architectures play in improving robot decision-making and action execution? 🏗️ 5. How can neuroscience inform the development of AI and robotics? 🔬 Congratulations to Enrico Donato and Muhammad Sunny Nazeer for the Best Student Contribution sponsored by IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Cognitive Robotics. #BioRob2024 #Robotics #AI #Neuromorphic #SensorimotorRepresentation #cognitiverobotics

Kicking off #IEEE #BIOROB24 with an excellent start today! Our workshop on "Sensorimotor Representation: Advancements in Learning Models for Robots " featured fascinating talks and engaging discussions. A huge thank you to all the speakers Chiara Bartolozzi, Pablo Lanillos, Yulia Sandamirskaya, Mehdi Khamassi, Martin Butz and organizers Egidio Falotico, Elisa Donati, Matej Hoffmann for their hard work and valuable insights. It is always a pleasure to connect with new researchers and continue fostering the discussions and collaborations that drive our scientific research forward. Looking forward to the days ahead!

#IEEE #BioRob2024 experience starts tomorrow! See you soon in Heidelberg 😉

🤖 Nilay Kushawaha et al. demonstrate how learning agents can gain from brain-inspired memory consolidation mechanisms, enabling them to continually update their knowledge through asynchronous and multimodal experiences - much like in real-world settings 🧑🏫 Read the paper to dive deeper into these insights or reach out to the authors for engaging discussions 🎉 Congratulations to the authors

Excited to share that our latest paper, “SoftSling: A Soft Robotic Arm Control Strategy to Throw Objects With Circular Run-Ups”, has been published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters! In this study, we present SoftSling, a novel control strategy for soft robots to accurately throw objects with circular run-ups, inspired by ancient slingers. Our approach uses neural networks to generate circular motion patterns based on object weight and target position, and to predict the release time. We achieved a success rate ranging from 75% to 88% for different objects. Kudos to all the co-authors for their invaluable contributions: Giulia Campinoti, Costanza Comitini, Cecilia Laschi, Alessandro Rizzo, Angelo Maria Sabatini, and Egidio Falotico. Check out the full paper here: https://lnkd.in/eqA32aFB Brain-Inspired Robotics Laboratory, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna #Robotics #SoftRobotics