Il Politecnico di Milano wins the first edition of the “Leonardo Drone Contest” organized by Leonardo in collaboration with six universities. The defense group communicates it in a note, specifying that the objective of the tender was "to promote the development in Italy of Artificial Intelligence applied to the field of unmanned systems".
The competitions were held on 18 September in Turin, where they challenged each other the teams of six universities: the Polytechnic of Turin, the Polytechnic of Milan, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa, University of Rome Tor Vergata and University of Naples Federico II.
The objective of the team of the winning PhD student, Gabriele Roggi of the Politecnico di Milano, is the development of a drone equipped with autonomous driving and navigation capabilities. The team, under the supervision of Professor Marco Lovera, is developing systematic methods and tools for the design of on-board autonomy functions and a localization algorithm, focusing in particular on motion planning and collision avoidance.
The award ceremony, which took place online, was attended by the Minister for Technological Innovation and Digitization, Paola Pisano, and the Minister for University and Research, Gaetano Manfredi. Also present were the governor of the Piedmont Region, Alberto Cirio, the mayor of Turin, Chiara Appendino, and the CEO of Leonardo, Alessandro Profumo.
The competition, which officially began in June 2019, thus closes the first of the three planned chapters and will end definitively in 2022. During the competitions of the next two years, the doctoral students, supported by the professors and in collaboration with the university and Leonardo teams, will propose new projects related to drone systems. The "Leonardo Drone Contest" is the only competition in Italy in which universities compete in an artificial intelligence contest and has two objectives: to encourage the development of technologies applied to unmanned systems and to trigger the birth of an ecosystem involving large companies, universities, SMEs, spin-offs and startups.
