Partner 1: UNIFI (Università di Firenze, Italy)

The University of Florence (UNIFI) is a public University with more than 20.000 students, 12 Faculties, and about 60 R&D Departments. Two research groups within the School of Engineering will be represented in the project: the Laboratory of Mechatronics and Dynamic Modelling (MDM Lab) Dept. of Energy Engineering http://www.unifi.it/mdmlab, and the Computational Vision Group (CVG) http://cvg.dsi.unifi.it/, Dept. of Systems and Informatics. UNIFI coordinates the ARROWS project and leads work packages WP1 (AUV design) and WP7 (Project management). In addition, UNIFl provides a significant contribution in WP2 and WP3. Research activities performed by UNIFI, and relevant to the project include: vehicle design and control, swarm localization and navigation, 2D and 3D geometric computational vision image/video representation, annotation and retrieval, visual servoing. The facilities of UNIFI strictly related to ARROWS include the test pools available at the location of MDM Lab in Pistoia, which are used for wet test of components, in particular of marine thrusters, propellers and vision systems. Deep-sea tests of components (till 1000m) can be performed by contracting external services to NURC http://www.nurc.nato.int/services/equipment.htm in La Spezia , where a pressure chamber capable of 10MPa (100atm) is available.

Prof. Benedetto Allotta, PhD, is Full Professor of Robotics at the School of Engineering of the University of Florence. He is co-founder and coordinator of the Laboratory of Mechatronics and Dynamic Modelling (MDM Lab, http://www.unifi.it/mdmlab ). He is the Dean’s Delegate for Orientation and Job Placement of the School of Engineering. His current research interests are visual control of robots, mechatronics, underwater robotics, sensor-based navigation of vehicles, Hardware In the Loop (HIL) simulation, and automation in transport systems. He is author of about 200 publications, including more than 30 papers on international journals with peer review, and 2 granted international patents. He is responsible of several competitive research grants and contracts coming from public agencies as well as private companies for a total amount of several hundred thousand Euro/year. He has served as a reviewer for a number of peer-reviewed international journals on Robotics and Mechatronics. He has been Associate Editor in the 2009 and 2010 editions of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. (ICRA). He has served as Evaluator and Panelist for the three calls of the European Project ECHORD (European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development http://www.echord.info ). Prof. Allotta was a co-founder of Scienzia Machinale s.r.l., Pisa, Italy (http://www.smrobotica.it ). Prof. Allotta is team leader of UNIFI within the THESAURUS project, http://thesaurus.isti.cnr.it financed in Italy in the framework of the program PAR FAS TUSCANY REGION, Action line 1.1.a.3. The THESAURUS project is aimed at developing technologies for archaeological investigation in Tuscan archipelago and the UNIFI team is responsible for the design, construction, and control.

Prof. Carlo Colombo, PhD, is Associate Professor of Computer Vision at the School of Engineering of the University of Florence. He is the founder and coordinator of the Computational Vision Group (CVG) (http://cvg.dsi.unifi.it). His current research activities focus on image and video analysis and 3D computer vision, for applications in robotics, computer graphics, biomedicine, 3D television, cultural heritage preservation, visual surveillance, advanced human-machine interaction and multimedia. On these topics he has published over 100 papers on refereed international journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings. Prof. Colombo is the general co-chair of the 12th European Conference on Computer Vision ECCV 2012 (Florence, 7-13 October 2012), and the Doctoral Symposium co-chair of the International Conference ACM Multimedia 2010 (Florence, 25-29 October 2010). He serves on the Program Committee of many international computer vision conferences, including the 23rd IEEE CVPR 2010 and ECCV 2010. He is Area Editor of the Computer Vision and Image Understanding journal (CVIU), and member of the Editorial Boards of the international journals Robotics and Autonomous Systems and Journal of Multimedia. Prof. Colombo was the scientific coordinator or technical responsible for several national and international R&D and technology transfer projects, including “Automatic Segmentation and Semantic Annotation of Sports Videos” (EU IST-1999 ASSAVID, 1999-2002), and currently collaborates with Toshiba Research Europe (Cambridge, UK) for research on 3D television.