The AI and Robotics laboratory (https://airlab.deib.polimi.it/) was established in 1973 by Marco Somalvico to support activities of Politecnico di Milano professors, researchers and students in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, and Machine Perception.

AIRLab activities include theoretical and applied research, as well as extensive teaching at Master and PhD level. Given the pervasiveness of these topics, AIRLab research involves multi-disciplinal collaborations with many teams both within Politecnico and at National and International level.

Research Topics:

• Robotics and Machine Perception. Autonomous robot systems. 3D robot mapping, path planning, navigation, SLAM. Autonomous Vehicles. Mobile manipulation. Trajectory tracking. Artificial vision. Person activity detection. Multi-sensor data fusion. Benchmarking of autonomous robots. Simulation and control of advanced robotic systems. Development of hardware and software for robot. Rapid Prototyping. Applications include: service, manufacturing, agriculture, logistics, entertainment, exploration, edutainment, rehabilitation, entertainment, art. In particular: Human-Robot Interaction, Robotic objects, Affective Robotics, Assistive Robotics, Entertainment and Art robotics, Robotic games also for people with disability (http://playbot4all.polimi.it/), agricultural robots, logistic robots, inspection robots.

• Artificial Intelligence. Autonomous agents and multiagent systems. Knowledge Engineering. Semantic Web. Interpersonal communication. Philosophical issues of computational science. Epistemology of experiments. Ethics.

• Machine learning. Deep Learning. Reinforcement Learning. Neural Networks. Genetic Algorithms. Bayesian Networks. Applications have been developed, among others, in these fields: water management, pricing, network load optimization, user modeling and profiling, control of complex devices, data mining, behavior detection, behavior generation for autonomous agents, image analysis, object recognition, human-robot interaction.

Currently, the two AIRLab sites host more than 40 robots (on wheels, flying, biomimetic, ...), a wide range of sensing devices (including a 12-camera motion capture system, an instrumented car, a 32-plane LIDAR, and physiological data acquisition systems), computational power for Machine Learning, mechanical and electronics workshops.