Afroditi Astreinidi Blandin

Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italian Institute of Technology

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About

Afroditi Astreinidi Blandin is a researcher whose work sits at the compelling intersection of biomechanics, soft robotics, and bioinspired tactile sensing. Her primary research areas focus on understanding how living organisms—particularly plants—mechanically interact with their environment, and translating those natural principles into innovative artificial sensing technologies. A major contribution is her exploration of how biological sensory structures morphologically compute mechanical stimuli before neural processing, a concept she detailed in her highly cited 2018 work, *"Biomechanics in Soft Mechanical Sensing: From Natural Case Studies to the Artificial World"* (25 citations). This foundational review has helped shape the field by providing a framework for designing soft sensors that mimic nature’s efficiency. Building on this, her 2017 study, *"Tunable Normal and Shear Force Discrimination by a Plant-Inspired Tactile Sensor for Soft Robotics"* (4 citations), demonstrates a practical application: a sensor capable of distinguishing between different force types, inspired by plant mechanoreception. This achievement highlights her ability to move from theoretical insight to functional hardware, offering a novel path for creating more adaptive and sensitive robotic systems. Her work is particularly notable for championing plants—often overlooked in bioinspiration—as models for robust, passive mechanical computation.