How Nature Can Lead the Next Robotic Revolution: ENHG Lecture by Dr. Federico Renda

This talk is generously hosted by Saadiyat Rotana Resort and Villas.

Membership sign up available from 7pm, lecture begins at 7:30pm in Emerald A meeting room 

All ENHG lectures are free and open to the public.

About the talk:

Nature is a rich source of knowledge, and present-day human life has undoubtedly progressed because of our ability to be inspired by nature and to then innovate solutions to our problems through biomimicry. Biological systems have been in development for billions of years; solutions for many different classes of problems have been provided through optimization of nature’s designs, development of materials and processes, and adaptation to changing conditions on Earth.

This talk will show how bio-inspiration is leading the transition from industrial robots, caged in inaccessible spaces within factories, to collaborative robots--machines that are designed to interact with natural and unstructured environments on the sea, land, and sky. Historical evidence of bio-inspiration will be presented, along with several examples of modern applications and future, potentially disruptive, innovations. A particular emphasis will be given to the mysterious and largely unexplored subsea world. 

About the speaker:

Dr. Federico Renda received his BSc and MSc degrees in Biomedical Engineering in 2007 and 2009, respectively, from the University of Pisa. He completed his PhD in Robotics in 2014 from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, and joined the IRCCyN Lab at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes in 2013 as visiting PhD student. 

Before joining Khalifa University, he had been appointed as Post-Doctoral Fellow at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, where he developed geometrically exact models of beam-like and shell-like underwater soft robots. Since 2015, he has been a Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Khalifa University Robotics Institute (KURI) at Khalifa University, where he presently serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2018, Dr. Renda joined the LS2N lab at IMT Atlantique, while in 2019, he joined the Defrost Team at INRIA Lille as Visiting Professor. 

His research interests include dynamic modeling and control of soft and underwater robots using principles of geometric mechanics. Dr. Renda is also a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).