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About

Fabio Giardina is a robotics researcher whose work spans soft robotics, legged locomotion, bio-inspired design, and collective robotic systems. He is perhaps best known for his highly influential 2016 review on soft manipulators and grippers, which has accumulated over 590 citations and helped establish a foundational framework for the field of soft robotics — an area leveraging material compliance to enable safer, more adaptive robotic interactions. His contributions extend to the design of climbing robots using tri-tube soft actuators, hybrid soft-rigid manipulators, and novel locomotion strategies for legged robots, including a one-legged hopper (CHIARO) that achieves stability through curved foot geometry without sensory feedback. Giardina has also pioneered model-free design optimization using Bayesian methods, demonstrating that automated physical iteration can rival human engineering intuition. More recently, his research has broadened to explore emergent collective behavior in ant-robot excavation systems, theoretical models of aquatic bipedalism inspired by primitive vertebrates, and modular control frameworks for floppy networks. Across this diverse portfolio, Giardina consistently bridges biological principles with engineering innovation, making him a versatile and impactful voice in modern robotics research.