Francesca Fiorilli

SUNY Polytechnic Institute, New York University

Papers

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About

Francesca Fiorilli investigates the intersection of animal behavior and robotics, with a primary focus on understanding and influencing collective motion in fish schools. Her pioneering experimental work explores how biomimetic robots can integrate into and interact with living animal groups, offering novel insights into self-organization and social dynamics. Her most-cited study, "Portraits of self-organization in fish schools interacting with robots" (2012, 40 citations), provides compelling visual and quantitative evidence of how robotic agents can alter group structure and cohesion. In her earlier foundational paper, "Interactions Between Fish and Robots: An Experimental Study" (2010), she demonstrated the feasibility of using robotic exogenous mates to probe and potentially control shoal behavior, laying the groundwork for a new field of bio-hybrid systems. Fiorilli’s work is notable for its interdisciplinary approach, merging ethology, control theory, and robotics to address fundamental questions about collective intelligence. Her contributions have significant implications for conservation, environmental monitoring, and the development of bio-inspired robotic swarms, establishing her as a key figure in the emerging domain of animal-robot interaction.