22 Facts About Dario Floreano

Dario Floreano is Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent System at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland and was the founding director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research Robotics.

Dario Floreano received a master's degree in computer sciences with a specialisation in neural computation from the University of Stirling in 1992.

In 2000, Dario Floreano was first named Assistant Professor, then in 2005 Associate Professor and in 2010 Full Professor of Intelligent Systems at EPFL's School of Engineering.

Dario Floreano was the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, which ran for 12 years, between 2010 and 2022.

Since 2022, Dario Floreano is a Fellow of the European Center for Living Technologies and since 2023 a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Dario Floreano currently serves as an Advisor Board Member for the ELLIS Tubingen Institute for Machine Learning and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.

Dario Floreano is interested in design principles of biologically-inspired intelligent systems with emphasis on the interplay between artificial intelligence, embodiment, and the environment.

One of the key research avenues explored in Dario Floreano laboratory is the field of drone perception and design, with several contributions to the design and autonomous control of aerial swarms.

In earlier work, Dario Floreano demonstrated the world's first team of 10 fixed-wing drones capable of coordinated outdoor flight by means of novel control algorithms that relied only on local radio communication among neighbouring drones: an algorithm based on ant-colony exploration and an algorithm based on evolutionary algorithms.

Dario Floreano then used the 10 fixed-wing drones to study Reynold's flocking algorithms and showed that the vehicle agility and communication range among the drones significantly affected swarm cohesion.

Dario Floreano proposed novel mechanical design and control methods for exploration of buildings by drone swarms: these drones were designed to perch on ceilings for energy saving, and detecting and communicating with other drones.

In most recent work, Dario Floreano developed a method for vision-based aerial swarms, whereby drones use onboard cameras to detect each other and autonomously coordinate their own motion with swarm algorithms, showing that drones can safely navigate in an outdoor environment despite substantial background clutter and difficult lighting conditions.

In parallel to the design and autonomous control of aerial swarms, Dario Floreano has been studying body-machine interfaces for more intuitive and immersive tele-robotic operation of drones.

Dario Floreano's team developed a novel BoMI method to automatically map spontaneous human gestures aimed at interacting with robotic devices.

Dario Floreano developed a soft exoskeleton, called a FlyJacket, coupled with virtual reality goggles and smart gloves to allow non-expert persons to naturally control a drone in search and rescue missions.

Dario Floreano's team developed fabric-based wearable clutches to train humans in more challenging drone teleoperation tasks.

Furthermore, Dario Floreano is interested in studying the effectiveness of different viewpoints in robotic teleoperation with Virtual Reality displays and has developed a machine learning method for extracting the BoMI for drone operation, which showed preliminary results on learning to use hand gestures for steering a swarm in third-person view.

Dario Floreano has studied the design and manufacture of multi-cellular soft robots and developed new functional materials for these applications.

Dario Floreano's team proposed a design for dual stiffness ball joint connections that can switch between a rigid and compliant connection, which were used to design a tensegrity-based spine structure.

Dario Floreano has published hundreds of peer-reviewed articles, tens of patents, as well as five books on neural networks, evolutionary robotics, bio-inspired artificial intelligence, bio-inspired flying robots, and most recently on "How Intelligent Machines Will Shape Our Future".

In 2017, Dario Floreano was featured by The Economist in a centre-page portrait as a pioneer in evolutionary robotics and aerial robotics.

Dario Floreano was co-founder and member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Artificial Life, Inc.