Swimming bio-inspired artefacts with 3D vision

Watch bio-inspired artefacts swimming in a small pool. The artefacts will move in a real adaptive way as a sort of natural "resonant" system, in which mechanical properties of skeletal apparatus and actuators stabilize the system during locomotion. Experimental sessions, on the one hand, will be interleaved with presentations describing project relevance along with its impact on technology, and on the other hand, will directly take visitors to the neuroscience-bioengineering research frontier, which surely represents a field of long-term, high-impact innovation having foundational importance.

The exhibit will present an evolution of the moving artefact developed within the FET FP7 LAMPETRA project and previously presented at FET09.

The multidisciplinary collaboration, which characterises the project, made possible to obtain an innovative platform whose locomotion results from the coupling of many parallel “tasks”, distributed, as in living animals, between morphology, materials, control, and connected to the artefact’s sensory-motor apparatus.

By exploiting on-board stereo vision and by moving in a smart way inside the aquatic environment, wireless artefacts will provide a strong visual impact and will attract the attention of the visitors on both technological and scientific issues enabling the scene they are looking at.

Inspiration from living beings can help design improved bioengineering artefacts (e.g. more ergonomic and more efficient), and the same artefacts can be used as scientific tools for further understanding mechanisms (e.g. neural ones) in living beings.

Contact: Eng. Stefano Orofino

Primary affiliation: Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
Position: PhD Student
City: Pisa
Country: Italy
Web Site: http://www.sssup.it

Stand: 11