| Time: | October 7, 2026, 9:45 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. |
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| Universitätsstraße 32, Room 101, Campus Vaihingen of the University of Stuttgart | |
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We are pleased to announce our upcoming ELLIS Unit Stuttgart Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Dario Floreano (EPFL)! Looking forward to seeing you all there! No registration necessary.
The talk will be followed by an informal reception during which finger food and drinks will be provided.
Professor Floreano will also be available for meetings. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email ellis-office@uni-stuttgart.de.
Title: Avian-Inspired Drones: Challenges and Opportunities
Abstract: Current drones do not match the agility, endurance, adaptability, and intelligence of birds. Birds are not only the masters of the sky but are also at ease on the ground and in water. Stringent aerodynamical constraints shaped their bodies and brains to leverage morphological change to adapt to diverse locomotion conditions that are still poorly understood. Biologists lack a good understanding of how birds control their articulations to perform agile maneuvers; engineers do not have viable modeling tools to understand the forces and moments produced by the large morphing surfaces of avian wings and tails; and computer scientists do not have models and simulations required to develop autonomous flight controllers for bird-like drones. Here I will show our efforts to abstract principles of avian morphological design and flight control by building, characterizing, and modeling avian-inspired drones that can be used to test biological hypotheses, develop model-based control systems, and eventually make them learn how to fly autonomously.
Bio: Dario Floreano is professor of Intelligent Systems at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. From 2010 to 2022, he was the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics that graduated more than 200 PhD students and spun off 15 robotics companies that generated hundreds of deep-tech jobs. Prof. Floreano has a multi-disciplinary training in visual psychophysics, neural computation, and robotics; he made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He held visiting research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Caltech/JPL, Harvard University, and Osaka University, and currently holds a visiting fellowship of the Institute of Advanced Studies at HKUST. He co-authored almost 600 publications and 5 books, spun off 6 robotics companies, and is on the editorial board of several journals, including Science Robotics. He is a Fellow of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, of the European Labs for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and of the European Center for Living Technologies. He is, or has been, on the Advisory Board of the International Neural Network Society, the International Artificial Life Society, the World Economic Forum General Agenda Council, the Future and Emerging Technologies Program of the European Commission, the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the ELLIS AI Institute in Germany, and of the Robotics Institute of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.