Keynote Speakers

Philippe WENGER
Research Director CNRS
Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes

Title: The paradigm of tensegrity and its applications in robotic design

A tensegrity structure is a prestressed assembly of compressive and tensile elements held together in equilibrium. The concept of tensegrity emerged more than a century ago in architecture and art. It is suitable for modelling biological systems such as cells and musculoskeletal systems. It has been more recently applied in robotics and mechanisms. Tensegrity robots can exhibit interesting properties, such as reduced inertia, natural compliance and deployability. 

The objective of this talk is to shed light on the concept of tensegrity and to show some applications in robotic bio-inspired design. A robotic model of a bird neck built in the frame of a collaborative work with biologists is used as illustration purposes.

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Xavier BONNET
Research Director CNRS
Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé

Title: A snakebot designed to tests hypotheses in evolutionary biology

Biological systems provide endless sources of inspiration to engineers. During the last decades, exponential advances in robotics opened avenues to imagine and develop a great variety of animal robots. Movements of living animals in motion are captured using sophisticated highspeed cameras. Anatomical details are scrutinized. Then, numerical models are derived and eventually zoobots are designed, built, tested, and sometimes commercialized. This scientific approach is fruitful but unidirectional. Indeed, it systematically intends to improve existing devices, vehicles, or drones, or to invent new ones. In the Dragon-2 project, we adopted a positive feedback approach where a swimming snakebot will be an essential mechanism to understand one of the key evolutionary transition in tetrapod vertebrates: the return to aquatic life. Natural variations represent the raw material for natural selection. Our project involves feedback loops where a huge number of snake species and individuals will be compared. Hopefully, comparisons will allow us to identify the drivers of swimming efficiency, and thus find the best compromises to parametrize the snakebot, which in turn will be used to challenge our hypotheses. The high diversity of terrestrial, amphibious, and truly marine snakes (>3,700 species) along with their outstanding plasticity offer an opportunity to understand the unique versatility of snakes to move on land, in trees, bushes, rocks, galleries, sand, mud, to swim at the surface and under water using a single mode: undulatory locomotion.