Organisers

Simona Aracri

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 

Emanuela del Dottore

Dr. Emanuela Del Dottore is a Research Scientist in Bioinspired Soft Robotics at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Italy. With a background in Computer Science (University of Pisa) and a Ph.D. in Biorobotics (Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Pisa), she works on the behavioral analysis of biological models to extract functional principles and traduce them into control and decision-making strategies for bioinspired robots, with particular focus on plant-inspired and growing robots. She currently focuses in defining bioinspired computational models for the distributed control and communication of multi-agent systems. Dr. Del Dottore has contributed to writing successful regional and international project proposals and participated in their development. These include, for instance, FET-OPEN FP7-ICT PLANTOID (G.A. 293431), FET-PROACT GROWBOT (G.A. 824074), ERC I-WOOD, POR FESR Toscana SMASH. She is co-advisor of several Ph.D. students, fellows, research interns, and postdocs working in plant-inspired robotics, growing robots, and soft robotics. Her goal is to extract functional rules from natural living systems, that can include soft-bodied animals and plants, and implement similar functionalities to enable compliance, efficient computation and adaptation in robotic artifacts to explore and monitor unstructured and mutable environments.

Angelo Odetti

Angelo Odetti, Ph.D., Marine Engineer and Naval Architect, is a Research Scientist at CNR-INM. From 2011 as responsible for technical project and design of a second generation Hovercraft and patented new concepts for Hovercraft technology. In 2013 he joined CNR as an associate researcher. Its research line is based on the ideation and development of new concept vehicles for access into remote and dangerous areas. He is the designer of various hybrid (ROV-AUV) vehicles: e-URoPe, P2ROV, PROTEUS and Blucy, of the ASV SWAMP expressly designed for extremely shallow waters and of tools, samplers and robotic manipulators. With PROTEUS and SWAMP he took part in five robotic-based scientific in the Arctic environment and one in Antarctica. He is author of more than 50 publications in International Journals/Conferences.

Barbara Mazzolai

Director

Laura Margheri

Manager

Robert Shepherd

Professor

Leixin Ma

is currently an assistant professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University. Before joining ASU, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCLA. She received her BSc in Naval Architecture & Ocean Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2015, an S.M. degree, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT in 2017 and 2021, respectively. Her research interest includes fluid-structure interactions of deformable structures, physics-informed machine learning, and the machine learning-aided design of programmable structures and robots. Her career goal is a data-driven and physically consistent approach to modeling and designing programmable smart structures and robots, especially under complex fluid flow conditions. Her work has been featured in the Physics of Fluids Journal. 

Roberta Ferretti

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.

Gabriele Bruzzone

received in 1993 the degree cum laude in electronic engineering from the University of Genoa. Since 1996 he has been working as a researcher at the CNR (National Research Council). Since 2010 he has been a senior researcher. His research activity focuses on the design and development of real-time hardware and software architectures for simulation and control of complex robotic systems (process automation plants, manipulators, autonomous and tele-operated underwater and surface marine vehicles, and terrestrial ones), sensors and actuators. In particular, since 2009, he has been the person in charge of the Marine Robotics lab and of the technological and scientific development of all the robots developed by the Marine Robotics research group. He has leaded the development of three USVs (Unmanned Surface Vehicles): Charlie, ALANIS, SWAMP; one USSV (Unmanned Semi-Submersible Vehicle): Shark; three ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles): Romeo, e-URoPe, P2-ROV; one UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle): MARC and a modular, transformable and multi-use marine autonomous vehicle: PROTEUS. Most of the aforementioned vehicles were successfully exploited at field during manifold scientific campaigns, many of which performed in harsh environments like Arctic and Antarctic regions.

Enrica Zereik

Permanent Researcher at the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) – Institute of Marine Engineering (INM). She is a Computer Science Engineer and holds a PhD (2007 - 2010) in space robotics for exploration missions from the University of Genoa and in collaboration with Thales Alenia Space; at that time she worked on a project, funded by the European Space Agency, aiming at building and controlling a robotic crew assistant for astronauts in space missions. After joining CNR, she started working on marine robotics, mainly focusing on advanced navigation and control algorithms for surface and underwater vehicles, soft and dexterous manipulation, stochastic control, experimental reproducibility and benchmarking, coordination and cooperation of multi-robot swarms, artificial vision and artificial intelligence applied to robotics. She is the coordinator of the Italian PRIN project BEASTIE, pursuing the development of an innovative concept in underwater soft manipulation, i.e. focusing on the issue of controlling a morphing multi-body supra-manipulator constituted by single-link agents connected through virtual links, thus eliminating the constraints given by cooperation of multiple physical kinematic chains.