Presentation - From Bio-Inspired Soft Robotics, to Morphological Computation and Embodied Intelligence

There has been a long-standing debate whether human-like general-purpose robots can be build on the conventional frameworks of computation or not. In this talk, we discuss how alternative approaches of computation processes which are more biologically inspired and plausible can be generated or emerged from embodied systems.

Biography 

Fumiya Iida (SM’17) is a Professor of Robotics at Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. He is also the director of Biologically Inspired Robotics Laboratory and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. He received his bachelor and master degrees in mechanical engineering at Tokyo University of Science in Japan, and Dr. sc. nat. in Informatics at University of Zurich in Switzerland. During his PhD project, he was also engaged in biomechanics research of human locomotion at Locomotion Laboratory, University of Jena in Germany. While he worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in USA, he awarded the Fellowship for Prospective Researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation, and then, the Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship hosted by ETH Zurich. In 2014 he moved to the University of Cambridge as the director of Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory. His research interest includes biologically inspired robotics, embodied artificial intelligence, and soft robotics, where he was involved in a number of research projects related to robot locomotion, manipulation, and human-robot interactions leading to some start-up companies. He was a recipient of the IROS2016 Fukuda Young Professional Award, Royal Society Translation Award in 2017, Tokyo University of Science Award in 2021.