A PhD student in Automotive Engineering for Intelligent Mobility at the University of Bologna since
2023, he carries out his research in the field of computer vision applied to autonomous driving. His
research interests focus in particular on depth estimation from event cameras, metric monocular
visual odometry in natural environments, and predictive control for autonomous vehicles. His current
research addresses very lowlatency visual perception and localisation where satellite positioning is
unreliable.
Education
He graduated in Physics at the University of Bologna in 2021 with a mark of 110/110, with a thesis on
the optimisation of the Loiano telescope for space debris detection, and obtained a Master’s Degree
in Artificial Intelligence at the same university in 2023 with a mark of 110/110 cum laude, with a
thesis on an autonomous driving system for sailing boats. Under the Erasmus programme, he spent the
second year of his Master’s Degree at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
in Trondheim.
Since November 2023 he has been a PhD student in Automotive Engineering for Intelligent Mobility
(Cycle 39, Curriculum 3) at the University of Bologna, supervised by Prof. Stefano Mattoccia, with a
project entitled “Vision Based Perception for Autonomous Driving”.
Research activity
His research develops along three lines.
- The first one concerns perception based on event cameras, sensors that, instead of sampling images at
a fixed frame rate, asynchronously report brightness changes with microsecond temporal resolution.
In this field he has developed depth estimation methods that operate at a temporal resolution of a few
milliseconds while keeping a computational cost compatible with onboard execution, and he has built
a synthetic stereo event dataset for model pretraining.
- The second line, started in 2026 during his research period abroad, concerns metric trajectory esti
mation from monocular video in natural environments, where satellite positioning is unreliable. The
proposed method uses the known height of the camera above the ground as a metric anchor to correct
the depth maps predicted by a lightweight monocular network and to recover trajectories at true scale,
with applications to trail running, orienteering and search and rescue.
- The third line applies autonomous driving principles to a 1:10 scale racing platform, for which he
designed and deployed a nonlinear Model Predictive Controller that unifies raceline following and the
avoidance of obstacles and opponents in a single optimisation problem.
Part of this activity is framed within MOST — the Italian National Centre for Sustainable Mobility,
funded by the European Union NextGenerationEU under the NRRP.
Publications
• Drive with the Flow, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Atlanta,
2025.
• Depth AnyEvent: A Cross-Modal Distillation Paradigm for Event-Based Monocular Depth Estimation,
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Honolulu, 2025.
• Towards Event-based Stereo Depth Estimation at Millisecond Resolution, IET Image Processing, 2026
(accepted, in press).
• Metric Trajectory Estimation from First-Person Video of Runners in Forest Environments, IEEE Access,
2026 (under review).Research periods abroad
From March to September 2026 he is carrying out a sixmonth research period at Chalmers University
of Technology in Göteborg (Sweden), Department of Mechanical Engineering, hosted by Prof. Marco
L. Della Vedova. The work on metric monocular visual odometry in natural environments was entirely
carried out there and resulted in a joint publication.
Coordination activity
He has been a member of the UniBO Motorsport Driverless team of the University of Bologna since
2020 and, since 2024, its team leader for the 1:10 scale car, coordinating the work of about twenty
bachelor’s and master’s students, setting the technical direction of the project and contributing directly
to software development.
Awards
• 2025 — First place at the RoboRacer Autonomous Racing World Championship, ICRA 2025, Atlanta
(USA), as team leader of the winning team.
• 2026 — Second and third place at the RoboRacer Autonomous Racing World Championship, ICRA
2026, Vienna (Austria), with the two cars entered by the team among twentynine participants.
Further training
He attended the CINECA Summer School “Dive into the World of HPC” and doctoral courses on deep
learning, computer vision and machine learning, as well as an academic English course. He took part
in the ECCV 2024 and ICRA 2025 conferences, presenting his own contribution at the latter, and in
the 2024 and 2025 editions of We Make Future, an event devoted to the dissemination of innovation.
In 2024 he took part in the organisation of the RoboRace Cup held within the IEEE Conference on
Decision and Control.
