Welcome to AIRLab

Established in 1973, the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory at Politecnico di Milano (AIRLab) is one of the longest-standing research groups in Italy working on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Machine Perception.

AIRLab’s theoretical and applied research covers a wide spectrum of topics. Many AIRLab projects are funded either by European or national agencies or by companies.  Given the pervasiveness of these topics, AIRLab researches involve multi-disciplinary collaborations with many teams both within Politecnico and at International level.

AIRLab researchers offer one of the broadest academic curricula in Italy on AI and Robotics. Our students produce yearly more than 50 master theses, and more than 15 PhD students are working at AIRLab.

AIRLab is active in the European robotics community, participates to the euRobotics AISBL and is among the organisers of the European Robotics League.

Expertise

AIRLab researchers are world-class experts in many fields of Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction, Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Philosophy of AI and Robotics.

Interaction among these fields is exploited producing both methodological results, and effective solutions for practical problems in many different fields, mostly proposed by companies and competitive projects.

Our projects

Just like our research lines, AIRLab projects cover a broad array of cutting-edge topics and approaches.

Our overarching strategy matches curiosity and creative innovation with very strong foundations in science and engineering.

Some movies about some of the projects are published on the YouTube channel of the lab.

Industrial projects and technology transfer

AIRLab has a long history of successful collaboration with industrial partners.

Services that AIRLab offers to companies include consultancy on the ways AI and Robotics can benefit their products and services, and development and co-development of innovative new ones.

Partners benefit from the fact that AIRLab masters the whole lifecycle of funded research projects: project design, consortium setup, proposal writing and submission, project coordination, project execution.

AIRLab also offers its experience in patenting and technology transfer, and access to the services of Politecnico di Milano for the protection of Intellectual Property resulting from collaborations.

History

Pro. Marco Somalvico and the Mo.Ro. robot, the first autonomous mobile robot in Italy

AIRLab was established in 1973 by prof. Marco Somalvico, as one of the first AI and Robotics research groups in Italy. In the years, AIRLab people followed the historical evolution of AI and Robotics, often integrating the two main areas, but also developing theoretical and applied research in each one of them. We started from the original works on logic programming, expert systems, knowledge acquisition, planning, artificial vision, through uncertainty modeling, reinforcement learning, neural networks, genetic algorithms, machine perception, autonomous robots, we came to deep learning autonomous vehicles, …

In 1987, Marco Somalvico was able to bring the major AI conference in Milan: IJCAI87. From this event, it was possible to establish the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA).