Bio-inspired aerial robots for delicate environments – with Dr S Armanini
Soft, safe, non-disruptive: bio-inspired aerial robots for delicate environments
Dr Sophie Armanini - Associate Professor in Aerial Robotics, Department of Aeronautics, Imperial.
Drones are in the news every day, usually in the context of armed conflict or privacy concerns. At best we think of drones as noisy flying cameras at weddings. But what more are small drones useful for? Why do most of them look the same? And how come they are still unable to fly even remotely as well as birds or insects?
This talk will discuss recent and ongoing research on small-scale, unconventional aerial robots (“drones”), focusing particularly on bioinspired configurations and on environmental sensing applications. Thanks to their small size, low cost and rapid manufacturing, aerial robots facilitate the exploration of new and unconventional designs, which can allow for complex tasks to be performed more efficiently or for new applications altogether. A particularly challenging domain is environmental sensing, which requires robots to be highly robust and versatile, while also posing a low risk to their environment and causing a minimal disruption. Moving away from the traditional robotics approach of relying heavily on advanced computation alone, we will discuss a more holistic approach that leverages the inherent physical features of a robot.
Dr Sophie Armanini is an associate professor in aerial robotics at Imperial College London, Department of Aeronautics. Her research focuses on unmanned air vehicles: especially unconventional design solutions, which result in new robotic capabilities, higher efficiency and performance, and new real-world applications. She is particularly interested in nature-inspired robots, including flapping-wing ones mimicking insects and birds.
Before joining Imperial in 2024, Sophie was an Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Munich and a Research Associate at Imperial College. She has also been a visiting researcher at Cornell University, Cranfield University, and AOS Group. Sophie holds an MSc from the Technical University of Munich and a PhD from TU Delft, both in Aerospace Engineering.
Event image courtesy of Imperial College
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