Biography
Dr. Francesco Fanelli received his M.Sc. in Automation Engineering from the University of Florence (Italy) in 2014, where he successfully completed his Ph.D. in 2018 with a thesis on the development and the field testing of navigation algorithms for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. He joined the Marine Autonomous and Robotic Systems group of the National Oceanography Centre as a Software Engineer in 2018. He has 9+ years of experience in the field of underwater robotics, having developed software specifically targeted at AUVs ranging from planning, navigation, and control strategies to mission monitoring and robot sensors data analysis tools. In his current role, his main activity consists in developing, maintaining, and testing NOC’s Onboard Control System, the unified software architecture that drives MARS AUVs; he is involved in all the phases of the software development process, from early concept design to the implementation and the field testing of the derived solutions. In the past three years, his focus has been the development of NOC’s multi-platform Obstacle Avoidance System, which has been employed on different platforms in demanding conditions such as underneath the ice in Antarctica and during low-altitude flight, and is now used on all MARS AUVs.