Last year the official launch during Leonardo's Innovation Day held in Turin, today the fully digital symposium for the presentation of the project of the first edition of the "Drone Contest. An Open Innovation Challenge ”conceived and organized by Leonardo, a global high-tech company and national champion in the sectors of Aerospace, Defense and Security.
The project presents itself as an Open Innovation opportunity and a collaboration between industry and University that aims to create a synergy between development and academic research in relation to the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Sensor Fusion, and Machine Learning. Leonardo's Drone Contest aims to encourage the development of both technologies related to artificial intelligence applied to unmanned systems and the birth of an ecosystem that involves, in a virtuous intertwining, large enterprises, universities, Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs ), spin-offs and startups.
The initiative, promoted by Leonardo, sees the collaboration of six important universities in the country: the Politecnico di Torino, the Politecnico di Milano, the University of Bologna, the Scuola Superiore S. Anna di Pisa, the University of Rome Tor Vergata and the University of Naples Federico II. This is the only competition in Italy in which universities compete in an artificial intelligence competition.
The competition, officially started in November 2019, will end in 2022, and during the contest the PhD students, supported by the professors and in collaboration with the university and Leonardo teams, will have to develop and propose the most innovative capabilities of the unmanned drone systems, i.e. without pilot. The first race of the Drone Contest will take place in Turin on September 18, 2020 and on this occasion the first results and the potential of the respective projects will be analyzed. Each year, the universities, divided by team, will compete in a scientific symposium and with specific competitions. Leonardo supports, for three years, the activities of the six PhD students of the universities involved with scholarships for the annual comparison
in tenders and aimed at promoting research and innovation.
The presentation symposium, held today in digital mode and moderated by Federico Ferrazza, Director of Wired Italia, was introduced by Laurent Sissmann, Senior vice President of Unmanned Systems Leonardo: “In the future the use of unmanned technologies will be ever greater and the Drone Contest is a fundamental step in Leonardo's path to create today a strong sector ecosystem that can lead, thanks to technological progress and regulatory changes, to the development of new business models ".
Following was the dialogue “Technologies and challenges that will change the future” with Roberto Cingolani, Chief Technology & Innovation Officer Leonardo: “The Drone Contest is a test of the future. A future that will be characterized by the use of unmanned systems that will carry out a spectrum of activities that man will never be able to perform with the same effectiveness and depth of analysis ".
During the symposium, the universities, with the PhD students of the Leonardo scholarships and the professors of the departments involved, presented the teams that work on the project and the technological developments that they have achieved and that they will use for the September challenge.
Creating and nurturing new purposes in advanced technologies is at the heart of Leonardo's present and future objectives, perfectly in line with and consistent with the Open Innovation process; the Drone Contest represents a fundamental new element that will show new and innovative fruits in the first race on 18 September.
Leonardo is today the only reality in Europe capable of providing complete remote pilot solutions - designing and developing all the elements of a drone based system - for intelligence missions, surveillance, monitoring, information acquisition, integrating platforms, radar sensors and electrooptics, mission systems and ground control stations. The development of unmanned technologies and applications is one of the important points of Leonardo's strategic plan which aims to follow a path of sustainable growth and increase the Group's competitiveness in the long term.
