Organisers
Permanent Researcher at the National Research Council of Italy – Institute of Marine Engineering. Previously Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Soft Systems Group, University of Edinburgh, working on the award winning project ORCA Hub and focussing on offshore robotic sensors. She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Marine Engineering and Naval Architecture (University of Genoa, University of A Coruña, University of Trieste and Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research). She also holds a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from the National Oceanography Centre - University of Southampton. Her Ph.D. was sponsored by the Italian National Research Council - Institute of Marine Sciences, in Venice. She has spent more than 6 months at sea on oceanographic sampling campaigns, in the Mediterranean Sea, Pacific Ocean and the North Sea. Her research interests encompass: the application of robotics for observational oceanography and environmental monitoring. She is interested in the entire process of data collection, from the device design to the deployment setting and, ultimately, in the resulting data. Innovative sensors and autonomous platforms need a cross disciplinary approach in order to thrive. New, sustainable, smart platforms can push the boundaries of observational oceanography, coastal management, offshore sites functioning and much more. Ground breaking technology can result in a new generation of data that can give us the needed insight to embrace a sustainable development and mitigate climate change
Ditzia Susana Garcia Morales
Institute of Assembly Technology
Leibniz University Hannover, Germany
garcia@match.uni-hannover.de
Zurong ZHANG
PhD Student in Soft Systems Group, University of Edinburgh, working on the fluidic control and application integration of soft robotics. She has the Bachelor's degree of communication engineering (Wuhan University) and Master's degree of electronics (University of Edinburgh). During the years, her interest in robotics led to the attempts and experience in embedded system design, PCB design, edge computing and data processing etc. Now she is studying for a PhD with the persistent enthusiasm in soft robotics. Her research interest is the fluidic control and data management for soft robotics.
Jan Peters
Institute of Assembly Technology
Leibniz University Hannover, Germany
peters@match.uni-hannover.de
Francesco Giorgio-Serchi
Chancellor’s Fellow (Lecturer) at the University of Edinburgh. Previously he was a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, within the Fluid-Structure-Interaction group and prior to that he was at the Centre for Sea Technologies and Marine Robotics of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy. Dr. Giorgio-Serchi holds an MSc from the University of Pisa, Italy, in Marine Technologies and a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics from the University of Leeds, UK.
Corrado Motta
Research fellow at the National Research Council of Italy – Institute of Marine Engineering. With a master's degree in computer science and three years of work in the automotive field, he is experienced in embedded systems, system architecture, and software integration. He also holds a master's in Sea and society, a program that focuses on marine and coastal monitoring, policies, and management. His interests, driven by the will to combine his two backgrounds, include all aspects of marine data science, from active data collection to reporting findings. Currently, he is working as a research fellow at the National Research Council of Italy – Institute of Marine Engineering, in Genoa, which is specialized in marine robotics. There, he supports the team's software development, sensor integration, and field campaigns.
Researcher at the Italian National Research Council. She received her Master’s Degree in Physics in 2008. After working at CERN as high energy physicist (2008-2010), in 2013 she joined the Institute of Marine Engineering in Genoa. Her activity dealt with the sensing capability of autonomous marine vehicles, focusing on data acquisition and analysis for the seabed characterization using automatic methods for the detection of Posidonia oceanica. During her Ph.D. (2017-2021) in cooperation with the Italian Navy Hydrographic Institute, she worked on the development of new approaches for the observation of transient phenomena in critical marine environments using autonomous marine vehicles for the data collection in different Arctic and Mediterranean field campaigns. Currently she is working on standardization of autonomous vehicles data acquisition for fair data management and open science.
Prof Annika Raatz
Head of the Institute of Assembly Technology
Leibniz University Hannover, Germany
Francesca De Pascalis
PhD Francesca De Pascalis, permanent researcher at National Research Council of Italy CNR-ISMAR, since 2004, master degree and PhD in environmental sciences. The main scientific interests are focused on hydrodynamic modelling, hydrodynamical processes in the coastal environments and studies of anthropic and natural impacts on lagoons and coastal areas. New interests are in areas of marine litter dispersal processes and innovative applications of robotic solutions for studies in coastal environments. She is the coordinator for CNR of the Interreg Italy-Croatia INNOVAMARE (https://www.italy-croatia.eu/web/innovamare) that aims at developing a cross-border Digital Innovation Hub on marine robotics among Italy and Croatia. She is one of the Italian ambassadors of the IOI-International Ocean Institute and involved in the construction of the ESFRI DANUBIUS Research Infrastructure (https://www.danubius-ri.eu/) on river-sea continuum.
Massimo Caccia
Massimo Caccia graduated in Electronic Engineering at the University of Genova in 1991. In the period October 16, 2013 – October 15, 2017 and October 16, 2017 – May 10, 2018 he served as Director and Acting Director, respectively, of the CNR Istituto di Studi sui Sistemi Intelligenti per l'Automazione (ISSIA-CNR). After joining CNR in 1993, his theoretical and applied research activities focused on marine robotics, mainly addressing the topics of modelling and identification, cooperative guidance and control, vision-based motion estimation and control, and embedded real-time platforms and architectures for Unmanned Marine Vehicles. He is among the European pioneer researchers in the field of unmanned surface vehicles and, with his research group, he developed pioneer research projects on the application of robotic technology to maritime safety. Research results, certified by more than 200 publications in international books, journals and conferences, led to the partnership in a number of EC, national and regional projects. He recently coordinated the projects Blue RoSES (EMFF), and MATRAC-ACP (Interreg Maritime Italy-France), and is coordinating the projects ARES (PON), and MODA (PNRM), that represent state-of-the-art R&D in the definition of guidelines and codes of practice for the operation of robotic vehicles in harbour waters and coastal water, and in the integration of shipbuilding and robotics according to the vision identified by Blue Italian Growth National Technology Cluster.