Research Engineer —
Giulio Fontana’s activities concern the design, technical supervision and management of funded research projects in robotics, as well as the design of systems and components. Over the years, he also accumulated significant experience in technology transfer, patents and licensing. Additional interests and professional experience of Giulio Fontana concern electroacoustics and sound perception.
As an engineer, he likes to think technical problems through and turn creative ideas into carefully structured designs; he also believes in the key roles of real-world experimentation and implementation-time insight.
Giulio Fontana’s experience includes roles in (the design first, then) the technical and executive management of several EU-funded projects. Among these: RAWSEEDS (FP6); RoCKIn (FP7); RockEU2 (FP7); SciRoc (H2020); RobMoSys (H2020); EUROBENCH (H2020, 2 different projects); METRICS (H2020).
Currently Giulio Fontana is mainly involved in AgrifoodTEF, a large-scale Digital Europe project about providing technological services to companies of the agri-food sector aiming at introducing AI and Robotics into their products. Within AgrifoodTEF he is working at multiple projects involving manufacturers of agricultural machinery.
Another side of Giulio Fontana’s activity concerns technology transfer and development of innovative products based on robot technology, such as: a Personal Mobility Kit, to add assisted and autonomous driving capabilities to standard commercial wheelchairs (partly developed via EU AAL project ALMA); a robotic bed mover for hospitals (pre-commercial procurement project funded by Regione Lombardia of Italy, which led to international patents of which Giulio Fontana is co-author); an energy-efficient washing machine (Industria 2015 Italian research programme); a machine vision system for industrial wood-sanding machines (FP6 project MEPOS); a robot for the inspection of hydroelectric penstocks (industrial project commissioned by a large company of the energy sector: resulting patents -of which Giulio Fontana is co-author- are pending).
Links
Institutional page @ Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering