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About

Anna Chiara Lai is a mathematician whose work bridges abstract number theory and practical robotics, with a focus on hyper-redundant manipulators and bio-inspired robot design. Her key research areas include discrete control systems, expansions in non-integer bases, and self-similar robotic structures. Lai’s major contributions lie in modeling robotic fingers, hands, and octopus tentacles using Fibonacci sequences and iterated function systems, showing how classical number-theoretic concepts can govern the reachable workspace and control policies of flexible manipulators. Her most cited work, “A Fibonacci control system with application to hyper-redundant manipulators” (2016, 14 citations), and “Robot’s finger and expansions in non-integer bases” (2012, 14 citations), establish a foundational link between non-integer base expansions and discrete reachability in robotics. She further extended these ideas to continuous models for an octopus arm (2016) and explored form closure properties in robot hands (2014). With over 46 total citations across her top papers, Lai’s work is notable for its originality in applying pure mathematics to solve control problems in soft and hyper-redundant robotics, offering a unique toolkit for designing more dexterous, nature-inspired machines.