Frédéric Boyer is a mechanical engineer from Grenoble INP (1991), PhD in robotics fromUPMC  (1994). He joined the Ecole des Mines de Nantes in 2009 and has since been a professor of robotics in the Automatic, Production and Computer Science Department (Laboratoire LS2N) from ITM Atlantic. He is passionate about biology.

He has published more than fifty articles in A-rank journals in a wide range of disciplines (geometric mechanics, dynamics of non-linear structures, robotics, sensors, fluid mechanics, aeronautics). In 2007, he received the Michel Monpetit prize from the French Academy of Sciences for his work in dynamics and received with his co-authors the La Recherche prize in 2014 in the Innovative Technologies category for their work on the electrical sense.

His current research focuses on bio-inspired locomotion (swimming, crawling, flying, etc.) and perception by electric fields. He has set up and coordinated several national projects (CNRS ROBEA "Robot Anguille", ANR "Robot Anguille en Milieux Opaques") and a European project (FP7 FET) called ANGELS, the aim of which was to produce and study a swimming robot with an electrical sense. " In the field of locomotion, I started by studying swimming and progressively widened my interest to other modes of locomotion such as crawling, insect-inspired flight ... Currently, our group contributes to design a general theory of bio-inspired locomotion dynamics based on tools in geometric mechanics (Riemannian varieties, Lie groups, principal fibers, connections ...) to take advantage of intrinsic formulations in order to obtain analytical models and fast algorithms that can be implemented on real robots.

In 2006, Frédéric Boyer launched a pioneering research on electrical sense for underwater robotics. He contributed with a multidisciplinary group to propose new sensors, new modelling tools (from low Reynolds number fluid mechanics), new control approaches based on sensors. " As a coordinator of collaborative projects on these topics, I have contributed to the construction of several eel robot prototypes and the first underwater robot capable of autonomous navigation with electric sense.

Press review archive

I'MTech / FEB 2020 / Artificial fish in the Venice lagoon

OUEST FRANCE / JAN 2019 / Nantes. When robots imitate animals

INSTITUT MINES TELECOM / APRIL 2015 / Embodied intelligence, a bio-inspired approach to robotics - Frédéric Boyer, Mines Nantes