The AIRLab team from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano came first in the Robotic Drone Contest organized by Leonardo and held in Rimini, Italy, during the ERF 2024 – European Robotics Forum.

The AIRLab team consists of Simone Mentasti, Matteo Molinari and Mattia Giurato, under the supervision of Prof. Matteo Matteucci and Francesco Amigoni (DEIB) and with the support of the Fly-ART lab, coordinated by Prof. Marco Lovera (DAER). Over the year, a group of students from the Robotics course also worked within the team.

The Robotic Drone Contest is a competition supported by the company Leonardo as an open innovation project that can drive innovation and stimulate new ideas towards increasingly complex requirements. Among these, multiple opportunities for collaborative heterogeneous robotic platform systems are envisaged, such as the inspection of areas affected by natural disasters or sites that are difficult for humans to access, and/or patrolling activities.

The purpose of the project is to integrate a system of heterogeneous robotic platforms, both UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and UGVs (Unmanned Ground Vehicles), capable of moving autonomously in unknown environments and without GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signal and providing information about the environment in which they operate to a ground control station where the human operator is present.