Jacopo Banfi

Hi! I am a Robotics Scientist at Lila Sciences, a startup based in Cambridge (MA), where I work on fleet orchestration for autonomous laboratories.

Before joining Lila, I was a Senior Robotics Engineer at Dexterity, a robotics startup based in the Bay Area. There, I was a core contributor to the AI that powers the only (to the best of my knowledge) truck loading and palletizing robots in the world capable of handling random sequences of boxes that are currently in production. I also spent one year at Amazon Robotics, where I worked on uncertainty-aware scheduling algorithms for very large fleets of autonomous mobile robots.

Before that, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Robust Robotics Group at MIT, where I worked under the supervision of Prof. Nicholas Roy, and in the Autonomous Systems Lab at Cornell University, where I worked under the supervision of Prof. Mark Campbell. During my time as a postdoc, I worked on various projects related to planning and scheduling for mobile robots funded by the Army Research Lab, the Office of Naval Research, and NASA.

I received a M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering (2014) and a Ph.D. in Information Technology (2018) from the Politecnico di Milano. My PhD thesis was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Francesco Amigoni and Prof. Nicola Basilico, and was devoted to the study of multi-robot exploration under communication constraints. In 2018, this thesis was awarded the title of best Italian PhD thesis in AI by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA).