Andrea Caiti: From Automation to Autonomy: today‘s robots as Leonardo machines and beyond

There is an obvious thread that links Leonardo visionary approach to machines and engineering design to the technological developments of the first industrial revolution and eventually to the current developments in robotics. Today’s robots are not anymore confined to industrial and manufacturing plants, but are becoming everyday life assistants to all of us, even in unexpected ways – have you ever wondered about the self-parking facility of your car? However, as robots are more and more present in our lives, our interaction becomes easier if their design takes hints from nature, revisiting some of Leonardo original ideas. But Leonardo’s machines were automata, operating in a fixed sequence of pre-defined moves. The great revolution of today’s robots is their capacity to adapt their behavior to the situation, to be aware of the context in which they are acting – sometime with simple rules, sometime through a complex interaction of sensing, decision-making, actions. The resulting human-robot collaboration goes probably beyond even Leonardo’s scientific imagination.

Vortrag in englischer Sprache.