Giulio Fontana received his M.Sc. cum laude degree in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2002. Since then he has been working as research engineer at the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory of Politecnico di Milano.
His core activities concern the design, technical supervision and management of funded research projects in robotics, with teaching as a side activity. Over the years, he also accumulated significant experience in technology transfer, patenting and licensing. Additional interests and professional experience of Giulio Fontana concern electroacoustics and sound perception.
As an engineer, he likes to think technical problems through, in order to turn creative ideas into carefully structured designs; he also believes in the key roles of real-world experimentation and implementation-time insight.
Giulio Fontana has roles (including Work Package Leader and Task Leader) in several international and national funded projects, both ongoing and completed.
Some of these projects focus on the design and implementation of scientific benchmarks for autonomous robot systems, such as SciRoc (H2020), EUROBENCH and METRICS (H2020). SciRoc also manages the European Robotics League benchmarking competition for autonomous robots, of which Giulio Fontana is one of the founders and organisers. Other projects in this research line where Giulio Fontana had a significant role include RockEU2 (FP7) and RoCKIn (FP7) -where the concept of benchmarking through competitions was born and developed- and RAWSEEDS (FP6), pioneering the idea of objective benchmarking of robot algorithms. He also worked on Plug&Bench, a subproject of RobMoSys about building a metamodel of robot benchmarking processes.
Another project line where Giulio Fontana is active concerns technology transfer and development of innovative products based on robot technology, such as: a Personal Mobility Kit adding assisted and autonomous driving capabilities to standard commercial wheelchairs (European AAL project ALMA); a robotic bed mover for hospitals (pre-commercial procurement project funded by Regione Lombardia, which led to international patents of which he is co-author); an autonomous robot transpallet (Industria 2015 project, funded by Italian Ministry for Economic Development); an energy-efficient washing machine (Industria 2015 again); a machine vision system for intelligent automation of industrial wood-sanding machines (European FP6 project MEPOS).
Finally, Giulio Fontana participates in projects where the main driver is scientific exploration, such as ROAMFREE (building a general-purpose framework for robust odometry, funded by Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research) or Politecnico di Milano's interdepartmental project i.Drive (analysis of the interaction between driver, vehicle, infrastructure, and environment).
Giulio Fontana is co-author of more than 20 peer-reviewed papers, international conference proceedings and book chapters; he also wrote or co-wrote tens of project deliverables and other scientific and technical documents.