Towards a self-organizing swarming distributed personal manufacturing environment
Fri, 05 Dec
|Online
Join Prof. Fabio Bonsignorio as he unveils a bold vision for a self-organizing, swarm-driven, and distributed manufacturing future—where AI, blockchain, and personal fabrication converge to revolutionize how we design, produce, and customize everything from microchips to megastructures.
Registration opens 07 Nov 2025, 6:00 am GMT+1
Time & Location
05 Dec 2025, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm GMT+1
Online
Date/Time in Local Time Zones
Date/Time in Local Time Zones
Central European Summer Time (CET) 1:00 PM 5th December 2025
Eastern Time (ET with DST) 8:00 AM 5th December 2025
Pacific Time (PT with DST) 5:00 AM 5th December 2025
China Standard Time (CST) 8:00 PM 5th December 2025
Japan Standard Time (JST) 9:00 PM 5th December 2025
New Zealand Standard Time (NZST) 1:00 AM 6th December 2025
Towards a self-organizing swarming distributed personal manufacturing environment
Fabio Bonsignorio, University of Zagreb
In a 10-15 year perspective a radical paradigm change in the full cycle of consumer service-products from raw materials to disposal will become mature.
Continuous progress in the price/performance ratio of computing equipment, quick scaling of AI systems (from Deep Reinforcement Learning, Large Language Models), the spreading of the distributed ledger (a.k.a. blockachain) technologies and the transition from a ‘browsing’ internet to internet computing, the parallel continuous reduction in the cost of manufacturing – towards personal fabrication - and the expected progress in cognition sciences, including the dawn of a new radically bio inspired Physical AI, all together will enable a new paradigm manufacturing.
We should look at a highly connected and highly distributed World Wide Manufacturing and Supply system seen as a massive loosely coupled network of networks merging seamlessly ‘information’ and material management/procurement/transformation and energy production/distribution. Based on coopetition swarm intelligence concepts widely extending the network robot concept.
The manufacturing facilities should range from personal autonomous fabricators based on tiny autonomous personal factories, merging generative AI, 3D printers, algorithmic assemblers, personal robots etc.), to massive adaptive ‘server’ factory for the mass scale production of ‘components’, namely chips or generic nanoengineered films/tissue, including information management like server farms (a la google, but more close to strong AI and hopefully distributed), from distributed factories for big items like airplanes/car ‘skeletons’, to local (to the ‘market’) assembling units customizing at personal level anything from cars to fridges.
Speaker Biography
Prof. Fabio Bonsignorio is ERA Chair in AI for Robotics at FER, University of Zagreb, Croatia. He is the Founder and CEO of Heron Robots (advanced robotics solutions), see https://www.heronrobots.com. He has been a visiting professor at the Biorobotic Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa from 2014 to 2019. He has been a professor in the Department of Systems Engineering and Automation at the University Carlos III of Madrid until 2014. In 2009, he got the Santander Chair of Excellence in Robotics at the same university. He has been visiting professor at the University of Basilicata in 2024. He has been working for some 20 years in the high-tech industry before joining the research community. He coordinates the ShanghAI Lectures (www.shanghailectures.org), initiated by the famous University of Zurich Prof em. Rolf Pfeifer in 2009, since 2013. He initiated the AIFORS Colloquia series (https://sites.google.com/view/aifors-colloquium-2024/home) in 2024.
He is developing radical new approaches to design novel, deeply biomimicking robots, addressing foundational issues in Physical AI. He is a pioneer and has introduced the topic of Reproducibility of results in Robotics and AI. He is a pioneer in the application of the blockchain to robotics and IA (smart cities, smart land, smart logistics, circular economy…). He coordinates the Topic Group of euRobotics about Experiment Replication, Benchmarking, Challenges and Competitions. He is co-chair of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society (RAS) Technical Committee, TC-PEBRAS (Performance and Benchmarking of Robotics and Autonomous Systems). He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a member of the Order of the Engineers of Genoa, Italy.
He coordinated the task force robotics in the G2net, an EU network studying the application of Machine Learning and Deep Learning to Gravitational wave research, Geophysics and Robotics. He will take care of Physical AI issues and Robotics and Automation applications in the new Cost Action FuSe (CA24101 – Testing Fundamental Physics with Seismology).
He has given invited seminars and talks in many places: MIT Media Lab, Max Planck Institute, Imperial College, Politecnico di Milano in Shenzhen, London, Madrid, Warsaw, Sankt Petersburg, Seoul, Rio Grande do Sul and elsewhere.