Andrea Munafo

Andrea Munafo is a Senior Researcher at the University of Pisa and Scientist and Manager at SeeByte Ltd where he directs SeeByte’s research programmes on Robotic Autonomy and Perception. Andrea Munafo has strong experience in applied science research in Cyber-Physical and Embedded Systems gained working for more than fifteen years on a number of National and International research projects. From 2013 to 2017 Andrea Munafo led the robotics and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) behaviours research group of the NATO ACT-Collaborative Anti-Submarine Warfare (CASW) Programme of the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), providing scientific and technical direction on robotic localisation and navigation systems, on Bayesian search and collaborative behaviours for autonomous sensor networks, including development of theoretical frameworks, algorithm design, simulation and on-board implementation. At CMRE, Andrea Munafo was also the lead of the CASW active sonar processing group, and under his direction a novel real-time signal processing chain was designed, developed and implemented for usage on embedded vehicles and it is today one of the key scientific capabilities of CMRE. In 2017 and in 2021, for my work on networked autonomous robotics and sonar signal processing, Andrea Munafo was awarded the NATO outstanding scientific achievements award. From 2017 to 2019 Andrea Munafo was head of Robotics Software at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) of the UK where he led a wonderful research group on innovative cooperative robotic networks and on-board control systems for long-term autonomy in harsh environments. This work included the design and deployment of a novel autonomy system for the NOC Autosub Long Range (ALR) vehicle and of a computationally efficient terrain-aided navigation system. ALR has recently completed the longest science trial ever done by an autonomous underwater vehicle: a month-long autonomous expedition from the South Coast of England to the Whittard Canyon off the coast of southwest Ireland and back. From 2019 to 2021 Andrea was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the NOC participating and leading research in autonomous control and navigation. He joined Seebyte in 2019 where he has been directing research in Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence. In 2021, Andrea Munafo was awarded with Prof. Helen Hastie of Heriot-Watt University a Prosperity partnership grant (2.6M GBP). Prosperity partnerships are prestigious grants from the UK government that are offered for close industry-university collaboration, with a goal to fund blue sky research that can be translated into products and services in the long term. Since November 2021, Andrea Munafo has been a Senior Researcher at the University of Pisa working on distributed sonar processing and shared autonomy.