[INVITED LECTURE] Prof. Fabio Bonsignorio
Professor ERA CHAIR University of Zagreb FER and CEO and Founder of Heron Robots
"Towards a New Paradigm Embodied AI Soft Robotics"
It is a widespread opinion that Robotics still need much more robustness, safety, lower manufacturing costs, and reduced control complexity and effort, while aiming at increasingly complex and adaptive behaviors in open ended environments, and many see ‘Embodied AI’ and ‘Soft Robotics’ as promising approaches, although controlling soft robots remains difficult and compliance alone does not solve all problems. A foundational approach, ‘Morphological Computation’, describes outsourcing computation to body-environment interactions, but despite consensus on embodiment’s importance, its definition remains unclear, making quantitative approaches—such as information-theoretic methods—important. The keynote will review these concepts to clarify embodiment and show how a better quantitative understanding may enable more effective robot modeling and control, while highlighting the need for improved research methodology and questioning the timeframe and conditions for achieving major advancements in productivity and elder care.
Short Bio
Prof. Fabio Bonsignorio is ERA Chair in AI for Robotics at FER, University of Zagreb, Croatia, and Founder and CEO of Heron Robots, with prior academic roles including visiting professorships and a Chair of Excellence in Robotics at the University Carlos III of Madrid. He has over 20 years of experience in high-tech industry and has coordinated major initiatives such as the ShanghAI Lectures and the AIFORS Colloquia series. He is developing radical new approaches to design novel deeply biomimicking robots addressing foundational issues in Physical AI, and is a pioneer in reproducibility in Robotics and AI as well as in applying blockchain to robotics and AI (smart cities, smart land, smart logistics, circular economy…) He holds leading roles in international robotics organizations, including IEEE RAS, and contributes to major European research initiatives and conferences.