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 and turn creative ideas into carefully structured designs; he also believes in the key roles of real-world experimentation and implementation-time insight.
Giulio Fontana's experience includes roles in the design and execution of many EU-funded projects, also as Work Package Leader or Task Leader. Among these projects, many concern the methodology, design and implementation of objective benchmarks for autonomous robot systems. This line of projects begins with RAWSEEDS (FP6 - pioneering the idea of scientific benchmarks for robot algorithms), and it continues through RoCKIn (FP7 - giving birth to the concept of benchmarking through competitions), RockEU2 (FP7), SciRoc (H2020), RobMoSys (H2020), EUROBENCH (H2020), METRICS (H2020).
Currently Giulio Fontana is heavily involved in AgrifoodTEF, a large-scale Digital Europe project about testing and experimentation for AI and Robotics systems for agriculture and other agri-food applications.
Another side of Giulio Fontana's activity concerns technology transfer and development of innovative products based on robot technology, such as: a Personal Mobility Kit, to add assisted and autonomous driving capabilities to standard commercial wheelchairs (partly developed through European AAL project ALMA); a robotic bed mover for hospitals (pre-commercial procurement project funded by Regione Lombardia of Italy, which led to international patents of which Giulio Fontana is co-author); an energy-efficient washing machine (Industria 2015 again); a machine vision system for industrial wood-sanding machines (FP6 project MEPOS). On the industrial side, he is currently working with several manufacturers of agricultural machinery and a large company of the energy sector.
Giulio Fontana is co-author of ~30 peer-reviewed journal papers, international conference papers and book chapters; he also wrote or co-wrote hundreds of project Deliverables and other scientific and technical documents.
