Publications by Dario Floreano

Edible Jumpers Powered by Shell Snapping

Food animation is gaining increasing attention for the ability to reduce waste and increase attractiveness in animals and humans. Although several examples of food animation methods have been recently described, the speed and range of motion are still limi ...

Wiley2025

First-Person View Interfaces for Teleoperation of Aerial Swarms

Dario Floreano

Aerial swarms can substantially improve the effectiveness of drones in applications such as inspection, monitoring, and search for rescue. This is especially true when those swarms are made of several individual drones that use local sensing and coordinati ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)2025

Edible aquatic robots with Marangoni propulsion

Dario Floreano, Shuhang Zhang, Bokeon Kwak, Markéta Pankhurst

Centimeter-scale aquatic robots could be used in environmental monitoring, exploration, and intervention in aquatic environments. However, existing robots rely on artificial polymers and commercial electronic components, which can pollute and disrupt sensi ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2025

Collision‐Resilient Winged Drones Enabled by Tensegrity Structures

Dario Floreano, Raphael Zufferey, William John Stewart, Mohammad Askari, Omar Aloui, Simon Jeger

Flying robots are becoming increasingly widespread, not only as remote‐vision agents but also as tools capable of physically interacting with our world. As robots fly closer to obstacles, the likelihood of collision rises. While collision resilience soluti ...

Wiley2025

Multi-Aerial Robotic System for Power Line Inspection and Maintenance: Comparative Analysis from the AERIAL-CORE Final Experiments

Dario Floreano, Charalampos Vourtsis

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)2025

Rapid and Continuous Stiffness Control of Fiber-Jamming Catheters for Cardiac Ablation

Dario Floreano, Yegor Piskarev

Minimally invasive surgeries, such as cardiac ablations, increasingly resort to magnetically-steered catheters. To enhance the dexterity and tissue interaction capabilities of these devices, researchers have developed catheters with variable stiffness (VS) ...

2025

Evolutionary Codesign and Fabrication of Tensegrity Joints with Integrated Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

Dario Floreano

Tensegrity robotic joints, inspired by the musculoskeletal systems of vertebrate animals, have gained interest due to their unique interplay of tension and compression forces, offering a high strength-to-weight ratio and inherent adaptability. However, the ...

2025

Tensegrity-based Robot Leg Design with Variable Stiffness

Dario Floreano

Animals can finely modulate their leg stiffness to interact with complex terrains and absorb sudden shocks. In feats like leaping and sprinting, animals demonstrate a sophisticated interplay of opposing muscle pairs that actively modulate joint stiffness, ...

2025

Instant variable stiffness in cardiovascular catheters based on fiber jamming

Dario Floreano, Yi Sun, Yegor Piskarev

Variable stiffness (VS) has revolutionized miniature surgical instruments, including cardiovascular catheters for minimally invasive surgeries (MISs), enabling advanced capabilities in stiffness modulation and multi-curvature bending. However, existing VS ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)2025

Edible Soft Actuators based on Konjac Glucomannan for Underwater Operation

Dario Floreano, Jun Shintake, Ryo Kanno, Bokeon Kwak, Markéta Pankhurst

Soft robots are being increasingly developed and deployed for underwater applications such as exploration, monitoring, and rescue owing to their innate compliance, mechanical and chemical stability, and waterproof properties. However, they are still predom ...

2024

Fast-Response Variable-Stiffness Magnetic Catheters for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Dario Floreano, Jun Shintake, Yi Sun, Yegor Piskarev, Matteo Righi

In minimally invasive surgery, such as cardiac ablation, magnetically steered catheters made of variable-stiffness materials can enable higher dexterity and higher force application to human tissue. However, the long transition time between soft and rigid ...

2024

Passive wing deployment and retraction in beetles and flapping microrobots

Dario Floreano, Hoang Vu Phan

Birds, bats and many insects can tuck their wings against their bodies when at rest and deploy them to power flight. Whereas birds and bats use well-developed pectoral and wing muscles1,2, how insects control their wing deployment and retraction remains un ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2024

The rise of transient robotics

Dario Floreano

Transient robots are robots designed to be non-long-lasting and degradable over time. This design philosophy is ideal for a wide range of applications, from environmental monitors to implantable systems. In this commentary, we explore the concept of transi ...

Elsevier BV2024

Adaptive morphing of wing and tail for stable, resilient, and energy-efficient flight of avian-inspired drones

Dario Floreano, Valentin Wüest, Simon Jeger

Avian-inspired drones feature morphing wing and tail surfaces, enhancing agility and adaptability in flight. Despite their large potential, realising their full capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of generalized control strategies accommodatin ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2024

Agile perching maneuvers in birds and morphing-wing drones

Dario Floreano, Enrico Ajanic, Valentin Wüest, Simon Jeger

Avian perching maneuvers are one of the most frequent and agile flight sce narios, where highly optimized flight trajectories, produced by rapid wing and tail morphing that generate high angular rates and accelerations, reduce kinetic energy at impact. Whi ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2024

A Sprayable Electrically Conductive Edible Coating for Piezoresistive Strain Sensing

Dario Floreano, Pietro Rossi, Bokeon Kwak

Edible electronics leverages the electronic properties of food-derived materials to deliver safer technologies that can be degraded (or digested) in the environment (or body) at the end-of-life. Sensors will be central to future smart edible robots, and ed ...

2024

Method for wind harvesting and wind rejection in flying drones

Dario Floreano, Victor Casas Rochel, Nathan Samuel Müller, Charalampos Vourtsis, William John Stewart

The present invention concerns a method of manoeuvring a vertical take-off and landing, unmanned aerial drone (100) comprising at least an aerodynamic surface (101), wherein, during a flight of the drone, the aerodynamic surface generates lift and/or drag ...

2024

A twist of the tail in turning maneuvers of a bird-inspired feathered drone

Dario Floreano, Hoang Vu Phan

A banked turn is a common flight maneuver observed in birds and aircraft. To initiate the turn, whereas traditional aircraft rely on the wing ailerons, most birds use a variety of asymmetric wing-morphing control techniques to roll their bodies and thus re ...

AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE2024

Towards edible robots and robotic food

Dario Floreano, Jun Shintake, Bokeon Kwak, Markéta Pankhurst

Edible robots and robotic food — edible systems that perceive, process and act upon stimulation — could open a new range of opportunities in health care, environmental management and the promotion of healthier eating habits. For example, they could enable ...

2024

Fast ground-to-air transition with avian-inspired multifunctional legs

Dario Floreano, Auke Ijspeert, Won Dong Shin, Hoang Vu Phan

Most birds can navigate seamlessly between aerial and terrestrial environments. Whereas the forelimbs evolved into wings primarily for flight, the hindlimbs serve diverse functions such as walking, hopping, and leaping, and jumping take-off for transitions ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2024