Robotics has gone through a transformation in the last decade. A conceptual revolution, started in the early 2000’s, has caused a steep transition from traditional, heavy industrial robots to safe, light, nimble co-bots which can co-exist and co-operate with humans, entering in touch with them. To do so, robots have become lighter, smaller, softer, and more intelligent.
The technological revolution of soft, intelligent machines today is spilling over from robotics to bionics. Not only soft technologies are safer, more effective and more adaptive: they can be above all more natural, as their motion and interaction patterns are dictated by similar principles as those moving our own human limbs. In the near future, users will be able to include soft bionic devices into their body schema, sending inputs and receiving feedback which match our inner model of interaction with the outside world.
This talk will illustrate several instances of application of these new ideas to robotic-aided rehabilitation, from prosthetics to assistance in upper motor neuron syndrome.
This talk was given during the Hi! PARIS Symposium 2024 by Antonio Bicchi, a Senior Scientist at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa and the Chair of Robotics at the University of Pisa. He graduated from the University of Bologna in 1988 and was a postdoc scholar at M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence lab. He teaches Robotics and Control Systems in the Department of Information Engineering (DII) of the University of Pisa. He leads the Robotics Group at the Research Center “E. Piaggio” of the University of Pisa since 1990. He is the head of the SoftRobotics Lab for Human Cooperation and Rehabilitation at IIT in Genoa. Since 2013 he serves ad Adjunct Professor at the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering of Arizona State University.
From January, 2023, he is the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Robotics Reserach (IJRR), the first scientific journal in Robotics. He has been the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2015-2019), which rapidly became the top Robotics journal by number of submissions. He has organized the first WorldHaptics Conference (2005), today the premier conference in the field. He is a co-founder and President of the Italian Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines (I-RIM)
His main research interests are in Robotics, Haptics, and Control Systems. He has published more than 500 papers on international
journals, books, and refereed conferences. His research on human and robot hands has been generoously supported by the European Research Council with an Advanced Grant in 2012, a Synergy Grant in 2019, and three Proof-of-Concept grants. He originated and is today the scientific coordinator of the JOiiNT Lab, an advanced tech transfer lab with leading-edge industries in the Kilometro Rosso Innovation District in Bergamo, Italy.
