The Politecnico di Milano has won the first edition of the “Leonardo Drone Contest: An Open Innovation Challenge”, a competition launched by Leonardo, in collaboration with six Italian universities, to promote the development of Artificial Intelligence as applied to the field of unmanned aircraft (drones).
Leonardo is supporting the activities of six PhD students, one per university, who are working to develop an autonomous piloting system for drones, pooling the resources and knowledge of the universities and companies involved.
At the end of the first year of activity, the teams from Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna, the Politecnico di Milano, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa, Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata and the Politecnico di Torino faced off against one another.
The Politecnico di Milano came out on top thanks to the team led by Gabriele Roggi, a PhD student whose research project aims to develop a drone equipped with autonomous piloting and navigation capabilities. The team, under the supervision of Prof. Marco Lovera, is developing systematic methods and tools to design on-board autonomy functions as well as a positioning algorithm, focusing in particular on motion planning and collision avoidance.
Over the course of the contests in the next two years, the PhD students, supported by their professors and in collaboration with the university teams and Leonardo, will develop and offer increasingly innovative capabilities as applied to unmanned drone systems.
