Main research interests (not in a specific order):
- Guidance, Navigation and Control for manned and unmanned vehicles
- Vision based navigation and control systems
- Haptic support systems for remote piloting and augmented guidance
- Formation and swarming flight control for unmanned vehicles
- Control systems, non-linear control, fuzzy and neural control
- Embedded control technologies and virtual environments
- Motion platform and simulation
A selection of recent research grants:
- 2020-2023 Principal Investigator for University of Pisa of “SAIS – Next Generation Smart Active Inceptors System development for Tilt Rotor application” – funded under H2020 CleanSky 2 Programme.
- 2019-2021 Principal Investigator for University of Pisa of “SMARTER – Next Generation of SMARt Active Inceptor for Tilt Rotor Application” – funded under H2020 CleanSky 2 Programme.
- 2018-2020 Principal Investigator for University of Pisa of “SENSORNAUTA – SAPR Multi-Sensore a Ricarica e Navigazione Automatiche” – funded by Regione Toscana, POR CReO FESR 2014-2020
- 2017-2019 Principal Investigator of “Study for development of submarine robotic systems hybrid ROV/AUV” – SAIPEM SONSUB.
- 2016-2017 Principal Investigator of “Preliminary feasibility study for Hydrone Control System” – funded by SAIPEM SONSUB.
- 2015-2018 Principal Investigator for University of Pisa of “Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology (WiMUST)” – funded under Horizon 2020 Framework Programme.
- 2015-2016 Principal Investigator of “Control Software Improvement Feasibility Study” – funded by ENI – SAIPEM SONSUB.
Other currently ongoing activities:
This is a list of ongoing research activities, at various levels of development, that might be suited for thesis and exam projects:
- Autonomous visually guided landing for rotorcraft.
- Haptic devices and cueing algorithm design for manned and remotely piloted vehicles.
- Real-time airborne GPS spoofing for security applications.
- Ultra-Wide-Band (UWB) – Inertial localization.
- LIDAR based obstacle detection and avoidance.
- Advanced path planning for coverage missions in constrained airspace.
- Vision-based unmanned aerial vehicle detection, tracking, and interception.
- Sensorless and communication-less cooperative aerial load transportation.
- Deep Neural Networks for Mission-level autonomous vehicle control.
- Advanced mission management architectures for unmanned vehicles.
- Vision-Based hovering for safe indoor operations