Skills and open innovation: young researchers compete in the Leonardo Drone Contest

(To Leonardo)
05/10/22

At the starting line the Drone contests by Leonardo, the challenge in which six Italian universities compete to design prototypes of a drone capable of flying autonomously and without a navigation system, using Artificial Intelligence.

The competition, now in its third and last edition for this cycle, will take place on 6 and 7 October in the Turin headquarters of Leonardo. Here the six universities - University of Rome Tor Vergata, Polytechnic of Turin, Polytechnic of Milan, University of Bologna, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna of Pisa, University of Naples Federico II - will demonstrate the increasingly advanced capabilities of their drones in locating and avoiding obstacles and in identifying and pursuing targets.

The challenge will be set inside a "competition field", which replicates an urban scenario with obstacles up to 3 meters high and minimum lighting conditions.

The winning team will be awarded in Rome next October 20 during an event where the results achieved and the scientific activities carried out by all the participants will also be presented.

Il Drone contests is a project of open innovation conceived by Leonardo with the aim of promoting an ecosystem capable of connecting large companies, the world of research and training, SMEs and start-up in a continuum in which new ideas, innovation projects and research programs in the fields of Artificial Intelligence applied to drones, the future of mobility and autonomous transport can be shared.

Leonardo, thanks to consolidated skills across all its business lines, aims to develop innovative skills, supporting and coordinating technological research, investing in the training of new talents and encouraging entrepreneurship in the sector. A strategy already in place to which the creation, in 2020, of the Leonardo Labs network, 11 hubs dedicated to research and development of frontier technologies, contributed to. The laboratory dedicated to the research of technological solutions for the next generation of aircraft and for Artificial Intelligence applied to the autonomous behavior of platforms is active in Turin.

With this edition of the Drone Contest the first cycle of the project ends. From next year a new three-year course of competitions with increasing complexity will open, which will see the involvement of other universities.

To follow the live streaming of the event:

• first and second heat / 6 October: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSjAW46FqPU

• third run / 7 October: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiNrlqCKWlQ

Today Leonardo is the only European company capable of creating complete remote piloted solutions - by designing and developing all the elements of a drone-based system - for monitoring, intelligence, surveillance, information acquisition applications, integrating platforms, sensors, 2 systems. mission and ground control stations.

The development of technologies and applications in the field unmanned it is part of the programmatic lines of the “Leonardo - Be Tomorrow 2030” strategic plan, which aims to pursue sustainable growth and increase the competitiveness of the Group in the long term.