Gabriele Ferri

Gabriele received the Master Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2003, and a Ph.D. in Biorobotics from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna Pisa, Italy, in 2008. 

In 2007, he was a visiting researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA. After a period as a Postdoctoral Investigator at Scuola Sant’Anna in which he worked as Project Leader of the DustBot and HydroNet EU projects, developing robotic networks for environmental monitoring, in 2012 he won a position as Research Scientist at the NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in La Spezia, Italy.

His research activities involve the topics related to robot cooperative autonomy in communication-limited environments. The distinctiveness of Gabriele’s research lies in his long lasting and successful effort in combining the development of innovative multi-robot solutions with their extensive validation in the field. 

The achieved results, witnessed by over than 100 publications in refereed conferences and journals, demonstrate that cooperative autonomy solutions not only can increase the effectiveness of heterogeneous robotic networks, but also show that they can be used in real-world scenarios. 

For this research activity, Gabriele has been recently awarded with the  2023 IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society Distinguished Technical Achievement Award.

His interest for multi-robot systems is witnessed by his activity in robotics competitions. He has been leading the CMRE Robotic Competition Programme since 2013. In this regard, he has been the General Chair of the Student AUV Challenge-Europe (SAUC-E). He had also the role of General Chair of the European Robotics League Emergency 2017 and euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge, which were the first and unique world’s competitions and events challenging international multi-domain robotics teams (sea, land and air) in realistic search and rescue scenarios held at a real power plant. 

Since 2017, he has been serving as the Chair for Europe of the IEEE OES Marine Autonomous Systems Competition Committee (MASC2). MASC2 Committee was born with the aim of homogenizing marine robot competitions around the world.

Enrico Simetti

Enrico Simetti (male, 29/07/1983) received the M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from University of Genova in 2008, and the Ph.D. from University of Genova in 2021. From 2012 to 2022, he has worked as Assistant Professor and since 2022 he is an Associate Professor at University of Genova, teaching Embedded Systems and Robotics. From 2020 to 2022, he has been the vice-coordinator for the M.Sc. in Robotics Engineering at the University of Genova and since 2023 he is the Coordinator of the programme. From 2020 he is the vice-coordinator of the euRobotics aisbl topic group in Marine Robotics.

His current research interests are in the field of robotics, in particular: marine robotics, embedded systems and mechatronics for robotic applications, force and motion control of robot manipulators and cooperation within multi-agent systems.  In details, his research is focused the development and experimental evaluation of control solutions for manipulation tasks with redundant systems. The case of multi-agents cooperating for achieving the manipulation task is also within his research interests. Moreover, he has worked on developing flexible human-robot collaboration frameworks capable to adapt to the human actions.

He is author of around 30 papers in international journals, more than 50 international conferences papers and 2 book chapters. He has participated in several national and international funded projects (3 FP7 and 4 H2020 projects, plus a project funded by Qatar National Research Foundation). He has been the principal investigator for the whole ISME interuniversity research center involvement within the H2020 ROBUST (2015-2020) project on autonomous in-situ deep-mining exploration with AUVs and he has been the principal investigator of UNIGE within the H2020 EUMR Marine Robots Network project.