Jacopo Panerati

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Lead Researcher, ATRC

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Biography

Jacopo is the lead researcher in machine learning for control at the Technology Innovation Institute (Abu Dhabi, UAE). Jacopo also worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (CA) and as a research associate at the University of Cambridge (UK). Jacopo’s research interests include aerial and multi-robot systems, reinforcement learning, simulation, aerospace, and software engineering.

Curriculum vitae

Current Research

Aerial Field Robotics: (i) autonomous BVLOS (10+km) formation flight with five fixed-wing drones, (ii) autonomous takeoff-to-landing GNSS-less ISR with three VTOLs, (iii) fast autonomous hexacopter flight up to 50m/s (180km/h).

Autonomous Drone Racing: human champion-level FPV flight with onboard sensing-only and without ground truth data for fine-tuning.

Former Projects

Safe Learning Control (website). As data- and learning-based methods gain traction, researchers must also understand how to leverage them in real-world robotic systems, where implementing and guaranteeing safety is imperative. To unify the frameworks used in control theory and reinforcement learning research—as well as to facilitate fair comparisons between these fields—we propose a set of physics-based benchmarks with intuitive APIs for safe and robust learning control.

Mitacs Elevate postdoctoral fellowship: Multi-agent reinforcement learning for decentralized UAV/UGV cooperative exploration. GDLS-C and the University of Toronto investigated how to effectively use multi-agent reinforcement learning in aerial and field robotics. GDLS-C’s goal is to improve situational awareness of ground vehicles by using heterogeneous teams of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Learning decentralized cooperation strategies can improve the resilience of these multi-robot systems—potentially faced with adversarial environments—and, ultimately, the safety of their human operators.

Mitacs Globalink research at the University of Cambridge’s Prorok Laboratory on adversarial private flocking. Privacy is an important facet of defense against adversaries. In this project, we introduced the problem of private flocking. We considered a team of mobile robots flocking in the presence of an adversary who is interested in identifying their leader. We developed a method to generate private flocking controllers that hide the identity of the leader robot. Our results demonstrate that we are able to achieve high flocking performance and simultaneously reduce the risk of revealing the leader.

ESA’s NPI postdoctoral research: A Symbiotic Human and Multi-Robot Planetary Exploration System. Most space agencies are now targeting the Moon as the next step in exploration beyond LEO and many already have plans for precursor robotic and human exploration. For example, ESA has championed the “Moon Village” concept since 2016 and NASA’s 2018 budget includes a Lunar Exploration Campaign. In this context, natural caves are appealing solutions to shelter humans and equipment for long-duration Lunar missions. In 2017, data from JAXA’s Kaguya probe revealed a 50km-long lava tube. For safety reasons, the preliminary robotic exploration of these tubes is imperative. Multi-robot systems carry the potential for greater efficiency and higher fault-tolerance, because of their ability to cooperate and inherent redundancy.

Jacopo’s doctoral research focused on adaptive computing systems for aerospace. Today’s computer systems are growing more and more complex, and space, in particular, represents a challenging environment for them. Self-adaptive computing carries unmatched potential and great promises for the creation of a new generation of smart, more reliable computers. Drawing from the fields of artificial intelligence, autonomic computing, and reconfigurable systems, we aim at self-adaptive computer systems for aerospace. The goal is to improve the efficiency, fault tolerance, and computational capabilities of aerospace computer systems, allowing them to perform their tasks for longer periods of time, fostering simpler and cheaper space exploration.

From 2012 to 2017, Jacopo acted as the Command&Data-Handling team leader of the student society Société Technique PolyOrbite developing a 3U nanosatellite for the Canadian Satellite Design Challenge (CSDC), a Canada-wide competition for teams of university students. PolyOrbite obtained the 3rd overall place in the 2012-14 and 2014-16 editions of the CSDC, as well as the CSDC’s Educational Outreach prize in 2016.

Select Publications

Scholarship and Awards

Professional Activities

Teaching

Contact Jacopo: jacopo {dot} panerati {at} gmail {dot} com

Find Jacopo on LinkedIn, GoogleScholar, GitHub, dblp, ResearchGate, ORCID, SemanticScholar, Scopus.