Prof. Fabio Bonsignorio is the ERA Chair in AI for Robotics and head of the AIFORS Research Group assigned to the Laboratory for Autonomous Systems and Mobile Robotics (LAMOR) at FER at the University of Zagreb. AIFORS’ Research Group aims to take intelligent soft robotics to the next stage complementing the existing expertise and research direction of the LAMOR lab.
Prof. Bonsignorio is also CEO and Founder of Heron Robots (advanced robotic solutions), see www.heronrobots.com. He was Visiting Professor at the Biorobotics Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa in the period 2014 to 2019. Before that, he had been a professor in the Department of System Engineering and Automation of the University Carlos III of Madrid. In 2009 he was awarded the Banco de Santander Chair of Excellence in Robotics at the same university. He had also been working in the R&D departments of several major Italian and American companies, mainly in the applications of intelligent systems and technology transfer with coordination/management responsibilities for more than 20 years.
He is a Founding Director of euRobotics aisbl, the private part of SPARC, and now part of ADRA. He is a past elected member of the Research Board of Directors of SPARC. He has been the coordinator and the main teacher of the ShanghAI Lectures (www.shanghailectures.org) since the 2013 edition. The ShanghAI Lectures are an advanced network MOOC teaching initiated several years ago by Rolf Pfeifer. He has pioneered and introduced the topic of Reproducible Research and Benchmarking in Robotics and AI, where he is one of the leading experts, if not the leading one. He is a pioneer in the applications of Blockchain technologies in Robotics.
He is a senior member and a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE/RAS. He coordinated the EURON Special Interest Group on Good Experimental Methodology and Benchmarking in Robotics and was a board member of EURON III. He is a member of the George Giralt PhD Award jury. He is the coordinator of the euRobotics Topic Group on Experiment Replication, Benchmarking, Challenges, and Competitions and is co-chair of the IEEE TC - Pebras. He participated in the design and launch of the euCognition society.
Prof. Bonsignorio was one of the main proposers and is a member of the Management Committee of the COST Action CA17137 - A network for Gravitational Waves, Geophysics and Machine Learning. He co-organized the 1st Conference on Machine Learning for Gravitational Waves, Geophysics, Robotics, and Control Systems. Through HeronRobots he is developing new (patent pending) technologies for soft light-weight manipulators and networks of mobile robots for low-frequency sensing in Gravitational Waves detection and Geophysics applications.
