My main field of interest is Mobile Robotics with special focus on advanced ground mobility. I graduated and earned a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the Politecnico of Bari in 2000 and 2004 respectively. In 2002-2003 I worked as a visiting scholar at the Mobile Robotics Laboratory of the University of Michigan, USA, where I joined a NASA-funded project, aiming at the development of  an accurate position estimation system optimized for the next Mars rover generation (Mars Mission 2009). Since January 2005, I am with the Department of Innovation Engineering of the University of Salento as an Assistant Professor in Applied Mechanics. In 2007, I was awarded a JSPS fellowship for a year-long research leave at the Space Robotics Laboratory of the Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. In 2010, I was also the recipient of an Endeavour Research Fellowship to undertake a research program at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney, Australia.
Since July 2011, I’m involved in the project Ambient Awareness for Autonomous Agricultural Vehicles (QUAD-AV) funded by the ERA-NET ICT-AGRI action (7FP). The project focuses on the development of sensors and sensor processing methods to provide an autonomous agricultural vehicle with ambient awareness. Some terrain traversability result obtained from a ground classifier based on geometric and color features is shown here (Youtube link).