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).