Alberto Broggi is General Manager at

VisLab VisLab is an Italian company working on computer vision and environmental perception for vehicular applications. It was founded in the early 90s as a research laboratory at University of Parma. It started its activities in 1990, with its invo ...

srl (spinoff of the University of Parma acquired by Silicon-Valley company

Ambarella Inc. Ambarella, Inc. is a Fabless manufacturing, fabless semiconductor design company, focusing on low-power, high-definition (High-definition video, HD) and Ultra-high-definition television, Ultra HD video compression, image processing, and computer ...

in June 2015) and a professor of Computer Engineering at the

University of Parma The University of Parma ( it, Università degli Studi di Parma, UNIPR) is a public university in Parma, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. It is organised in nine departments. As of 2016 the University of Parma has about 26,000 students. History During the ...

in Italy.

Research in computer vision, hardware, and AV

Broggi's research activities started in 1991–1994. His group together with the Dipartimento di Elettronica,

Politecnico di Torino The Polytechnic University of Turin ( it, Politecnico di Torino) is the oldest Italian public technical university. The university offers several courses in the fields of Engineering, Architecture, Urban Planning and Industrial Design, and is co ...

, Italy, built their own hardware architecture (named PAPRICA, for PArallel PRocessor for Image Checking and Analysis, based on 256 single-bit processing elements working in SIMD fashion) and installed it on board of a mobile laboratory (Mob-Lab) to develop and test some initial concepts in the field of intelligent vehicles.Alberto Broggi, Vincenzo D'Andrea, and Francesco Gregoretti, A low-cost parallel VLSI architecture for low-level vision, In Mikio Takagi, editor, MVA'92 – IAPR Workshop on Machine Vision and Applications, pages 11–15, Tokyo, Japan, 1992. International Association for Pattern Recognition, IAPR. In 1996, Broggi's group worked to develop a real vehicle prototype (named ARGO, a Lancia Thema passenger car which was equipped with vision sensors, processing systems, and vehicle actuators) and developed the necessary software and hardware that made it able to drive autonomously on standard roads.Massimo Bertozzi and Alberto Broggi, GOLD: a Parallel Real-Time Stereo Vision System for Generic Obstacle and Lane Detection, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 7(1):62–81, January 1998 Broggi's research group (called VisLab from then on) gathered all their findings in a book,Alberto Broggi, Massimo Bertozzi, Alessandra Fascioli, and Gianni Conte, Automatic Vehicle Guidance: the Experience of the ARGO Vehicle. World Scientific, Singapore, April 1999, which was then also translated in Chinese.Alberto Broggi, Massimo Bertozzi, Alessandra Fascioli, and Gianni Conte, 智能车辆:智能交通系统的关键技术. 人民交通出版社 (China Communications Press), China, 2002, When Broggi was with the University of Pavia, his research was extended and applied to extreme conditions (automatic driving on snow and ice): in 2001, VisLab led the research effort of providing a vehicle (RAS, Robot Antartico di Superficie) with sensing capabilities so that it was able to automatically follow the vehicle in front.Alberto Broggi and Alessandra Fascioli, Artificial Vision in Extreme Environments for Snowcat Tracks Detection, IEEE Trans. on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 3(3):162–172, September 2002 In 2010 Broggi's group embarked on driving 4 vehicles autonomously from Italy to China with no human intervention. This challenge is called

VIAC VIAC, the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge, is the challenge conceived by VisLab as an extreme test of autonomous vehicles. It ran from July 20, 2010 to October 28, 2010, involving four driverless vehicles driving with virtually no ...

, for VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous ChallengeAlberto Broggi, Pietro Cerri, Mirko Felisa, Maria Chiara Laghi, Luca Mazzei, and Pier Paolo Porta, The VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge: an Extensive Test for a Platoon of Intelligent Vehicles, Intl. Journal of Vehicle Autonomous Systems, special issue for 10textsuperscriptth Anniversary, 10(3), 2012, .Massimo Bertozzi, Alberto Broggi, Alessandro Coati, and Rean Isabella Fedriga, A 13,000 km Intercontinental Trip with Driverless Vehicles: The VIAC Experiment, IEEE Intelligent Transportation System Magazine, 5(1):28–41, 2013 "Without driver or map, vans go from Italy to China"
Elaine Kurtenbac, AP.COM .
, Jo Ling Kent, CNN.COM Soon after this, Broggi was awarded a second ERC grant (Proof of concept) to industrialize some of the results obtained and successfully tested on the VIAC vehicles. On July 12, 2013,

tested the BRAiVE vehicle in downtown Parma, negotiating two-way narrow rural roads, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights, artificial bumps, pedestrian areas, and tight roundabouts. The vehicle traveled from Parma University Campus up to Piazza della Pilotta (downtown

Parma Parma (; egl, Pärma, ) is a city in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna known for its architecture, Giuseppe Verdi, music, art, prosciutto (ham), Parmigiano-Reggiano, cheese and surrounding countryside. With a population of 198,292 ...

): a 20 minutes run in a real environment, together with real traffic at 11am on a working day, that required absolutely no human intervention. Part of this test was driven with nobody in the driver seat, for the first time ever on public roads.

References

External links

Research papers by Alberto Broggi (Google Scholar)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Broggi, Alberto Artificial intelligence researchers Italian computer scientists Living people Machine learning researchers Italian roboticists University of Parma alumni Academic staff of the University of Parma 1966 births 20th-century Italian scientists 21st-century Italian scientists European Research Council grantees