Publications de Francesco Stella

Synergy-based robotic quadruped leveraging passivity for natural intelligence and behavioural diversity

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Quadrupedal animals show remarkable capabilities in traversing diverse terrains and display a range of behaviours and gait patterns. Achieving similar performance by exploiting the natural dynamics of the system is a key goal for robotics researchers. Here ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2025

Design of robotic physical intelligence

Francesco Stella

Bridging the performance gap between robotics and biological systems demands significant advancements across multiple domains, including mechanical design, control theory, modeling, and artificial intelligence. In this thesis, I will introduce innovative m ...

EPFL2025

IMU Based Pose Reconstruction and Closed-loop Control for Soft Robotic Arms

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Soft continuum manipulators are celebrated for their versatility and physical robustness to external forces and perturbations. However, this feature comes at a cost. The many degrees of freedom and compliance pose challenges for accurate pose reconstructio ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.2024

Anniversary AI reflections

Francesco Stella

For our fifth anniversary, we reconnected with authors of recent Comments and Perspectives in Nature Machine Intelligence and asked them how the topic they wrote about developed. We also wanted to know what other topics in AI they found exciting, surprisin ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Toward Long-Lasting Large-Scale Soft Robots: The Durability Challenge in Architectured Materials

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella, Qinghua Guan

Soft robots promise groundbreaking advancements across various industries. However, soft robots are susceptible to wear, fatigue, and material degradation. Their durability and long-term reliability are often overlooked, despite being critical for the succ ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.2024

Soft Robot Shape Estimation With IMUs Leveraging PCC Kinematics for Drift Filtering

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

The control possibilities for soft robots have long been hindered by the need for reliable methods to estimate their configuration. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) can solve this challenge, but they are affected by well-known drift issues. This letter pr ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

The science of soft robot design: A review of motivations, methods and enabling technologies

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Novel technologies, fabrication methods, controllers and computational methods are rapidly advancing the capabilities of soft robotics. This is creating the need for design techniques and methodologies that are suited for the multi-disciplinary nature of s ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2023

Piecewise Affine Curvature model: a reduced-order model for soft robot-environment interaction beyond PCC

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella, Qinghua Guan

Soft robot are celebrated for their propensity to enable compliant and complex robot-environment interactions. Soft robotic manipulators, or slender continuum structure robots have the potential to exploit these interactions to enable new exploration and m ...

IEEE2023

Proprioceptive Sensing of Soft Tentacles with Model Based Reconstruction for Controller Optimization

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Nana Obayashi, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

2023

Prescribing Cartesian Stiffness of Soft Robots by Co-Optimization of Shape and Segment-Level Stiffness

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Soft robots aim to revolutionize how robotic systems interact with the environment thanks to their inherent compliance. Some of these systems are even able to modulate their physical softness. However, simply equipping a robot with softness will not genera ...

MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC2023

A Provably Stable Iterative Learning Controller for Continuum Soft Robots

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Fully exploiting soft robots' capabilities requires devising strategies that can accurately control their movements with the limited amount of control sources available. This task is challenging for reasons including the hard-to-model dynamics, the system' ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Smell Driven Navigation for Soft Robotic Arms: Artificial Nose and Control

Egidio Falotico, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Elephants and other animals heavily rely on the sense of smell to operate. Soft robots would also benefit from an artificial sense of smell, which could be helpful in typical soft robotic tasks such as search and rescue, pipe inspection, and all the tasks ...

IEEE2023

How can LLMs transform the robotic design process?

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

An experimental validation of the polynomial curvature model: identification and optimal control of a soft underwater tentacle

Nana Obayashi, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

The control possibilities for soft robots have long been hindered by the lack of accurate yet computationally treatable dynamic models of soft structures. Polynomial curvature models propose a solution to this quest for continuum slender structures. Nevert ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.2022

Controlling Maneuverability of a Bio-Inspired Swimming Robot Through Morphological Transformation

Nana Obayashi, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge, Francesco Stella

Biology provides many examples of where body adaption can be used to achieve a change in functionality. The feather star, an underwater crinoid which uses feather arms to locomote and feed, is one such system; it releases its arms to distract prey and vary ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022