Abstract: Soft robots are robotic systems with purposefully designed compliant elements embedded into their mechanical structure.  This design allows safe human-robot interaction and enables soft robots to exhibit unprecedented adaptation, sensitivity, and agility. However, to deliver on these high expectations, soft robots must be capable of exploiting the intelligence of their body, and at the very least. But soft robots’ intrinsically underactuated and nonlinear nature makes the derivation of control laws challenging. This talk will focus on recent efforts from my group on deriving closed loop controllers in the fully dynamic regime that can deal with and eventually exploit the natural intelligence provided by the robot’s physics.

Speaker Bio: Cosimo Della Santina is Assistant Professor at TU Delft and Research Scientist at the German Aerospace Institute (DLR). He received his Ph.D. in robotics (cum laude, 2019) from the University of Pisa.
He was a visiting Ph.D. student and a postdoc (2017 to 2019) at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was also a postdoc (2020) at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Technical University of Munich (TUM). He is now a guest lecturer at the same university. Cosimo has been awarded euRobotics Georges Giralt Ph.D. Award (2020), and the “Fabrizio Flacco” Young Author Award of the RAS Italian chapter (2019). He also has been a finalist of the European Embedded Control Institute Ph.D. award (2020). His main research interests include (i) Modelling for control and model-based control of soft robots and other elastic systems, (ii) Combining Machine Learning and Model-Based Strategies with application to mechanical systems, (iii) Grasping and manipulation.