The Politecnico di Milano won the first edition of the “Leonardo Drone Contest. An Open Innovation Challenge ”, the competition launched by Leonardo, in collaboration with six Italian universities, to promote the development of Artificial Intelligence applied to the field of unmanned systems.
The competitions were held on 18 September in Turin, where teams from six universities competed: the Polytechnic of Turin, the Polytechnic of Milan, Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa, University of the Studies of Rome Tor Vergata and University of Naples Federico II.
The Minister of Technological Innovation and Digitization, Paola Pisano, the Minister of University and Research, Gaetano Manfredi, the President of the Piedmont Region, Alberto Cirio, the Mayor of Turin took part in the digital awarding event. , Chiara Appendino, Leonardo's CEO, Alessandro Profumo, and Leonardo's Senior Vice President Unmanned Systems, Laurent Sissmann.
The goal of the team of the winning doctoral student, Gabriele Roggi of the Politecnico di Milano, is the development of a drone 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 result of the first edition of the "Leonardo Drone Contest", as highlighted in the presentation of the project during the live broadcast by Laurent Sissmann, Senior Vice President Unmanned Systems at Leonardo, showed the potential for fruitful collaboration between industry and universities, implemented in these months through the work, commitment and ingenuity of PhD students and team colleagues. And with this in mind, the University of Bologna, with the PhD student Lorenzo Gentilini and Professor Lorenzo Marconi, was awarded the “Special Jury Prize”.
The objective of the "Leonardo Drone Contest", that is to create synergies between development and academic research in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Sensor Fusion and Machine Learning, aims in fact to favor the development of both technologies relating to applied artificial intelligence to unmanned systems is the birth of an ecosystem involving large companies, universities, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), spin-offs and startups.
The competition, which officially began in June 2019, closes the first of the three planned chapters today and will end in 2022. During the contests of the next two years, the doctoral students, supported by the professors and in collaboration with the university and Leonardo teams, will develop and propose skills most innovative applied to unmanned drone systems. The "Leonardo Drone Contest" is the only competition in Italy in which universities compete in an artificial intelligence competition.
Leonardo is today the only reality in Europe able to provide complete remote piloted solutions - by designing and developing all the elements of a drone based system - for intelligence, surveillance, monitoring, information acquisition missions, integrating platforms, radar sensors and electro-optics, mission systems and ground control stations. The development of technologies and applications in the unmanned field is one of the relevant points of Leonardo's strategic plan which aims to follow a path of sustainable growth and increase the competitiveness of the Group in the long term.