Special Session #14

Automatic target detection and tracking is critical for protection and surveillance settings in maritime environment, especially in remote locations where it can be expensive or logistically difficult to employ human operators. Over the past years, sonar technology has seen major developments in remote sensing both in civilian and defense applications. Nowadays sonar systems and acoustic sensors can be mounted onboard several types of smart Maritime Unmanned Vehicles. Much of the research and technological innovation of recent years has been focused on the design of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASV) able to accomplish numerous tasks by using a wide range of sensor payloads. Additionally, there is growing interest in the design and deployment of such autonomous systems eventually in distributed networks, in which they make autonomous decisions and operate collaboratively in order to accomplish their given tasks efficiently. In particular, surveillance operations in maritime environment is challenging for many reasons: potential threats have to be properly classified against innocent intrusions, acoustic sensors need ad-hoc algorithms for a proper measurements analysis, as well for acoustic communication protocols and control strategies for the coordinated motion and navigation of the team of Maritime AUVs or ASVs composing the Maritime Unmanned System.

The aim of this Special Session is to gather recent advances and developments in the maritime target detection and tracking field. Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Automatic target detection and classification;
• Distributed data fusion architectures and methods for networked sonar systems;
• Artificial intelligence for target detection and tracking in sonar systems;
• Classification and identification of multiple target systems;
• Acoustic communications for AUV coordination;
• Sensor performance and mission planning for AUVs under uncertainty;
• Multi-domain sensor data fusion and dissemination;
• Reduction of reliance on GPS for AUVs operations;
• Obstacle avoidance techniques;
• Autonomy in Co-operative Swarm;
• Multi-domain Modelling and Simulation (M&S);
• Sonar signal processing and communications.

Gianluca Antonelli is Full Professor at the "University of Cassino and Southern Lazio". His research interests include marine and industrial robotics, multi-agent systems, identification. He has published more than 50 international journal papers and 120 conference papers, he is author of the book "Underwater Robots" (Springer-Verlag, 2003, 2006, 2014, 2018) and co-authored the chapter "Underwater Robotics" for the Springer Handbook of Robotics, (Springer-Verlag, 2008, 2016). He has been involved in various roles in research projects funded under the European FP7 and H2020 schemes: Co3AUVs, ECHORD, ARCAS, EUROC, AEROARMS, DexROV, WiMUST, ROBUST and EUMR. He served both as independent expert and reviewer for the European FP/H2020 calls several times since 2006. He is member elected of the "IEEE Robotics & Automation Society" (RAS) Administrative Committee, he has been coordinator elected of the EuRobotics Topic Group in Marine Robotics, he has been secretary of the IEEE-Italy section, he has been chair of the IEEE RAS Italian Chapter, he has been Chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee in Marine Robotics. He served in the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Springer Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics, he has been Editor for the RAS Conference Editorial Board. He has been chief editor of the open access journal "Frontiers in Robotics & AI" specialty "Robotic Control Systems". He is Fellow IEEE since 2021. In October 2020, he was top 1% in the field "Industrial Engineering & Automation" according to common metrics and the SCOPUS database (https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/2). https://sites.google.com/unicas.it/gianluca-antonelli

Paolo Di Lillo received the Ph.D. degree in robotics from the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio in 2018. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio.
His research interests include dynamic and kinematic control methods for redundant base-fixed manipulators, as well as mobile dual-arm systems, assistive robotics and control underwater vehicle-manipulator systems. He has been involved in the H2020 project DexROV on autonomous underwater intervention with remote supervision via satellite communication.

Daniele Sebino Terracciano is currently a Ph.D. student in Information Engineering at the University of Pisa. He’s also an Engineer Officer at the Naval Support and Experimentation Centre of the Italian Navy, in La Spezia. He joined the Italian Navy in 2006 and completed the Naval Academy of Livorno in 2010. He received the M. Sc. degree in Telecommunications Engineering in 2013 from the University of Pisa. He started his Ph.D. program in Underwater Electroacoustics and Robotics, in November 2017. His research interests include acoustic measurement techniques, electroacoustics, as well as signal-processing techniques for underwater and robotic applications, direction of arrival estimation and vector sensors, target detection and localization.

Lorenzo Bazzarello is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in Information Engineering at the University of Pisa. At the moment he is also employed as an Engineer Officer at the Naval Support and Experimentation Centre of the Italian Navy, in La Spezia. He joined the Italian Navy in 2006 and completed the Naval Academy of Livorno in 2010. He received the M. Sc. de-gree in Telecommunications Engineering in 2013 from the University of Pisa. In 2015 he attended the course in Mine Counter Measure at the Naval Academy of Livorno. In 2017 he received a postmaster degree in Underwater Electroacoustics and Application at the University of Pisa. He started his Ph.D. program in Underwater Electroacoustics and Robotics, in November 2019.