Keynote Speakers

Lucia Pallottino is currently Full Professor at the Centro di Ricerca "E. Piaggio" and the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Pisa.  She received the "Laurea" degree in Mathematics (1998) and the Doctoral degree in Robotics and Industrial Automation (2002). She has been Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor from 2007 to 2023 of the University of Pisa. She has been Visiting Scholar at M.I.T. (2000-2001) and Visiting Researcher at UCLA, (2004).

She currently is Director of Centro di Ricerca "E. Piaggio, co-founder of  Proxima robotics srl and X-star Motions srl, Senior Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (since 2020) and Principal Investigator of the DeCAIR Erasmus+ European project and Scientific collaborator in the DARKO European project.

She has been Chair of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society Italian Chapter (I-RAS) (Jan. 2015- Dec. 2018), Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems (2021-2023), Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2017-2020) and of the IEEE Transaction on Robotics (2014-2017). She has also been Principal Investigator of the ILIAD European project.

Her main research interests within Robotics are in motion planning and control, optimal control, coordination of multi-robot systems, distributed algorithms.

Fabrizio received his bachelor's and master's degrees in automation engineering from the University of Naples Federico II (Italy) in 2010 and 2013, respectively. His master's thesis was conducted at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) and Disney Research Zurich (DRZ), focusing on wind effect estimation and correction on a quadrotor UAV. Between 2013 and 2014, he worked as a researcher at the Center for Telematics (ZfT) in Wurzburg, Germany. His main project involved controlling a dielectric elastomer generator (DEG) for energy harvesting applications. From 2014 to 2018, Fabrizio worked on his doctoral thesis at Inria Rennes (France) and Boston University (USA). The primary goal of his thesis was the autonomous navigation of a group of drones in unknown/unstructured environments using only onboard sensors (e.g., cameras, IMU) and local communication (e.g., WiFi). Between 2018 and 2021, he was a postdoctoral researcher and scientific collaborator at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). His main activities included research, writing national/international proposals, supervising doctoral and master's students, and teaching/organizing the aerial robotics course.

In terms of research, during his time at EPFL, the research areas he was involved in included the design and development of modular aerial vehicles, aerial drone swarms, and human-robot interfaces (HRI). He also led a project for autonomous detection and deterrence of pigeons on buildings by drones using AI-based techniques.

Currently, Fabrizio works at Leonardo's Future Rotorcraft Technology Lab as a senior researcher, conducting research to utilize AI-based perception and sensor fusion algorithms to enhance the pilot's awareness of the external situation.

Fabrizio is passionate about new technologies such as autonomous vehicles and their potential impact on society. After nearly 10 years of academic research, he transitioned to the industry, holding the current position of research fellow at Leonardo.

(Final confirmation pending)

He is a research science manager at Amazon, specializing in control, optimization, and data-based algorithms. Before joining Amazon, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, collaborating with Prof. Aaron Ames and Prof. Yisong Yue. His research at Caltech focused on high-level planning in partially observable environments and the design of control algorithms to ensure the safety of autonomous systems during highly dynamic maneuvers.

During his Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley, he collaborated with Prof. Francesco Borrelli in the MPC lab. His doctoral research led to the development of the Learning Model Predictive Control (LMPC) strategy, a model-based policy iteration approach.

Luigi Palmieri is the leader of the group Reinforcement Learning and Behavior Learning in the department of Artificial Intelligence Research at Robert Bosch GmbH - Corporate Research. His research currently focuses on behavior learning and prediction, reinforcement learning, hybrid systems of learning-planning-control,  MPC and numerical optimization techniques, planning considering human motion predictions and social constraints for single- and multi-robot systems. On these topics, he has co-authored several papers at IJRR, TRO, RA-L, ICRA, IROS, FSR. He earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Freiburg, Germany. During his career, he has contributed and taken responsibilities in several EU publicly funded project, i.e., EU FP7 project Spencer, EU H2020 projects ILIAD and DARKO.