Welcome

I am a Associate Professor in Mobile Robotics at the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and the Oxford e-Research Centre. I co-lead the Mobile Robotics Group (MRG) with Professor Paul Newman. I am also a Tutorial Fellow in Engineering Science at Keble College.

I have a passion for cyber-physical systems, among which robots shine, and love working on making robots autonomously operate from the ground up. In doing so, I believe more and more that learning and adaptation are paramount for robot autonomy. I hope that my work will enable robots to be widely adopted in a variety of applications, from industrial and business to domestic environments, helping the people in their day-to-day tasks.

For this reason, my research combines robotics and artificial intelligence to design autonomous systems capable of perception, mapping, localisation, and adaptive decision-making. By exploiting multiple sensing modalities – from vision to lidar to radar – my group explores how robots can reliably navigate and interpret the world, even in challenging or extreme conditions, and deploys robots in environments ranging from urban Oxford to the Scottish Highlands. Another key aspect of my work examines the interaction between robotics and infrastructure, enabling the dynamic sharing of sensing and computing resources between robots and smart environments to support safe and scalable autonomy.

I joined MRG as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant in 2018 after a DPhil in Engineering Science at the Università degli Studi di Pavia under the supervision of Prof. Tullio Facchinetti. During my doctoral studies, I investigated the application of real-time scheduling algorithms to energy management in electromechanical devices, with the goal of reducing power consumption. Before that, I had my BSc at the Università degli Studi di Pavia and my MSc at the Politecnico di Torino, where I studied Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, respectively.