Dr. Eng. Renato Zaccaria is Full Professor in Computer Science at the Department of Communication, Computer and System Sciences (DIST), University of Genova, Italy. He teaches the courses "Computer Science Basics" at the Faculty of Humanities, "Basic Programming" (bachelor) and "Robot Programming" (master) at the Faculty of Engineering where he is also the local Coordinator of EMARO, European Master on Advanced Robotics (joint master with Ecole Centrale of Nantes and Warsaw University of Technology). He leads the Mobile Robotics & Ambient Intelligence Research Group in the lab called Laboratorium. He started working on Robotics in one of the very early Italian interdisciplinary research groups, which grew up to the actual cluster of robotic laboratories at University of Genova - one of the biggest in Italy. His scientific work is still characterised by the multi-disciplinar approach, including AI, Computer Science, Bioengineering, Philosophy, Automatic Control. He has been researcher and project leader in many national and European projects in Autonomous Robotics, and responsible of many industrial contracts as well.

His present activity regards mainly Service Robotics and Ambient Intelligence. In order to purposively carry out technology transfer, in 2000 he founded one of the Department's spin-off companies, Genova Robot, whose present R&D activity is strongly linked to academic research.

He is author/coauthor of more than 140 international scientific papers, of two textbooks, and of two international patents in Robotics (guidance of autonomous mobile robots).

He has been in charge of several academic tasks; he has been Vice Dean of his Department, member of the board of the PhD school "Bioengineering and Robotics", member of the administrative board of Liguria Scientific and Technological District "SIIT" (consortium of about 100 SM&LEs in Liguria), and formerly Dean of the Computer Engineering tracks (bachelor and master levels).

Presently, he is responsible of the European Master on Advanced Robotics EMARO, coordinator of the Robotics Engineering Master Track, and head of the Commission for the Study Programmes at the Faculty of Engineering.

He was born in 1949. He has been awarded the title Commendatore della Repubblica because of his activity in technology transfer in Robotics.

Selected publications

1. A. Scalmato, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Describing and Recognizing Patterns of Events in Smart Environments With Description Logic", IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS MAN AND CYBERNETICS PART B-CYBERNETICS (2013, in press)
2. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "How the Location of the Range Sensor Affects EKF-based Localization", JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT & ROBOTIC SYSTEMS, vol. 68 121:145 (2012)
3. A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Planning and obstacle avoidance in mobile robotics", ROBOTICS AND AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS 60(4), 628:638 (2012)
4. A. Scalmato, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Describing and Classifying Spatial and Temporal Contexts with OWL DL in Ubiquitous Robotics" 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2012, Best Cognitive Paper Award Finalist
5. MASTROGIOVANNI F. SCALMATO A. SGORBISSA A. ZACCARIA R., "Robots and Intelligent Environments: Knowledge Representation and Distributed Context Assessment", AUTOMATIKA vo. 52. 256:268 (2011)
6. BAGLIETTO M. SGORBISSA A. VERDA D. ZACCARIA R., "Human navigation and mapping with a 6DOF IMU and a laser scanner" ROBOTICS AND AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS vol. 59 1060:1069 (2011)
7. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Scalmato, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Smart Environments and Activity Recognition: A Logic-based Approach" in Activity Recognition in Pervasive Intelligent Environments, Liming Chen, Chris D. Nugent, Jit Biswas and Jesse Hoey eds, Atlantis Press (2011)
8. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Distributed Sensing and Human-Aware Robot Reasoning Mechanisms" in Networking Humans, Robots and Environments, N.Y. Chong ed., Bentham Books Publishers (2011)
9. A. Morro, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Path following for unicycle robots with an arbitrary path curvature" IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ROBOTICS vol. 27 1016:1023 (2011)
10. MASTROGIOVANNI F. SCALMATO A. SGORBISSA A. ZACCARIA R., "Problem Awareness for Skilled Humanoid Robots" INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MACHINE CONSCIOUSNESS vol 3 91:114 (2011)
11. Mastrogiovanni F. Sgorbissa A. Zaccaria R., "A cognitive model for recognizing human behaviours in smart homes" ANNALES DES TELECOMMUNICATIONS vol. 65 523:538 (2010)
12. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Activity recognition in smart homes: from specification to representation", Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems 21(1-2): 33-48 (2010)
13. MASTROGIOVANNI F., SGORBISSA A., ZACCARIA R., "From Autonomous Robots to Artificial Ecosystems" Handbook on Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, H. NAKASHIMA; H. AGHAJAN AND J.C. AUGUSTO EDS. Springer-Verlag (2010)
14. F. Meriaudeau, D. Fofi, A. Meriaudeau, H. Adema-Labille, V. Torres, A. Tremeau, R. Zaccaria, V. Resaz, "European Programs and their Extension in the Field of Computer Vision, Color and Robotics", Journal of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, No. 6(102) (2010) ISSN 1392-1215
15. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Robust Navigation in an Unknown Environment with Minimal Sensing and Representation", IEEE Transactions on System, Man and Cybernetics, Volume 39 , Issue 1 212-229 (2009)
16. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Context assessment strategies for ubiquitous robots", Proc. of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Robotics and Automation, Kobe, Japan, 2009
17. F. Capezio, F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Robot-Assisted Surveillance in Large Environments", Journal of Computing and Information Technologies, Vol 17, No 1 (2009)
18. MASTROGIOVANNI F. SGORBISSA A. ZACCARIA R., "On the Problem of Describing Activities in Context-Aware Environments" INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ASSISTIVE ROBOTICS AND MECHATRONICS vol. 9 no. 4 4:19 (2009)
19. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Scalmato, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "An Integrated Approach to Context Specification and Recognition in Smart Homes", Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics (ICOST 2008), Ames, Iowa, June 28-July 2, 2008
20. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Scalmato, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "CDL: an Integrated Framework for Context Specification and Recognition", Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2008), Patras, Greece, July 21 - 25, 2008
21. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Scalmato, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Designing a Context-Aware Artificial System", Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-10), Baded-Baden, Germany, July 23-25, 2008
22. R. Zaccaria, "ICT Pervasiva: la Domotica", Mondo Digitale, Milano, no. 24, December 2007 (in Italian)
23. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "An Active Classification System for Context Representation and Acquisition", in J. C. Augusto and D. Shapiro (eds.), Advances in Ambient Intelligence, Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence and Application (FAIA) Series, vol. 164, IOS Press, November 2007
24. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "The More the Better? A Discussion about Line Features for Self-Localization", Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ 2007 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2007), San Diego, CA, October 29-November 2nd, 2007
25. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, Zaccaria, "A Distributed Architecture for Symbolic Data Fusion", Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07), Hyderabad, India, January 6-12, 2007
26. A. Greco, C. Penco, G. Sandini, R. Zaccaria (eds.), "Scienze Cognitive e Robotica", Proceedings of 3d National Symposium on Cognitive Sciences, ERGA Ed., Genova, 2006, ISBN 88-8163-474-0 (in Italian)
27. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Designing a System for Map-based Localization in Dynamic Environments", in Intelligent autonomous systems 9, Di Tamio Arai, R. Pfeifer, T. Balch, H. Yokoi eds., IOS Press, 2006
28. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "On the Tips of One's Toes: Self-localization in a Dynamic Environment", Proceedings of 6th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation (CIRA05), Helsinki, Finland, June 27-30, 2005
29. P.P. Puliafito, G. Sandini, R. Zaccaria, "Tecnologia, Ricerca e Innovazione", in "Genova del Saper Fare, Lavoro, Imprese, Tecnologie", exhibition catalog, SKIRA Ed., Milano, 2004 (in Italian)
30. F. Mastrogiovanni, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "A System for Hierarchical Planning in Service Mobile Robotics", Proceedings of 8th Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-8), Amsterdam, The Netherland, March 10.13, 2004
31. A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "The Artificial Ecosystem: a Distributed Approach to Service Robotics", Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2004), New Orleans, April 26, May 1 2004
32. M. Miozzo, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "A multiagent, distributed approach to Service Robotics", Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems (KES 2003), Invited Session in Ontology and Multi-Agent Systems Design (OMASD '03), 3-5 September, Oxford, England
33. A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Roaming Stripes: integrating path planning and reactive navigation in a partially known environment", Proceedings of 11th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR 2003), Coimbra, Portugal, June 30 - July 3, 2003
34. R. Zaccaria, "Aspettando Robot", Mondo Digitale, Milano, no. 7, September 2003 (in Italian)
35. A. Scalzo, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Distributed Multi Robot Reactive Navigation", Proceedings of the 6th Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems Conference (DARS 02), Fukuoka, Japan, June 25-27 2002
36. M. Giaroli, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Safe Outdoor Navigation with Local Information", Proceedings of International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI02), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, June 24-27, 2002
37. M. Frixione, G. Vercelli, R. Zaccaria, "Diagrammatic Reasoning for Planning and Intelligent Control", IEEE Control Systems Magazine, March 2001
38. M. Piaggio, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "Pre-emptive Versus Non Pre-emptive Real Time Scheduling in Intelligent Mobile Robotics", Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 12, no.2, Taylor & Francis, April 2000
39. M. Piaggio, A. Sgorbissa, R. Zaccaria, "A Programming Environment for Real Time Control of Distributed Multiple Robotic Systems", Advanced Robotics, Vol. 14, no.1, VSP Publisher, 2000
40. P. Morasso, R. Zaccaria, "An architecture for Staffetta, a Mobile Assistive Robot" (invited paper), Proceedings of 1st Europe-Japan Symposium on Human Friendly Robotics, Tokyo, Japan, November 1999
41. M. Piaggio, R. Zaccaria, "An Efficient Cognitive Architecture for Service Robots", Journal of Intelligent Systems, Freund & Pettman Publ., Endholmes Hall, England, Vol. 9:3-4, 1999
42. M. Piaggio, R. Zaccaria, "Using Roadmaps to Classify Regions of Space for Autonomous Robot Navigation", Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal, Vol. 25, 3-4, 209-217, Elsevier Science, 1998
43. G. Vercelli, R. Zaccaria, "Informatica", 350 pages, Nuova Editoriale Scientifica, Milano-Napoli, 1998 (in Italian)
44. 1SM. Piaggio, R. Zaccaria, "Distributing a Robotic System on a Network, the ETHNOS Approach", Advanced Robotics, Vol. 12, no.8, VSP Publ., April 1998
45. F. Giuffrida, P. Morasso, R. Zaccaria, "A Multi-Functional, Low-Cost Service Robot" (invited paper), Proceedings of 2nd International Advanced Robotics Program, IARP97, Genova, Italy, October 1997
46. M. Piaggio, G. Vercelli, R. Zaccaria, "Autonomous Navigation Using a Reactive Agent", Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1321, Pag. 96-105, Springer-Verlag, 1997
47. M. Frixione, M. Piaggio, G. Vercelli, R. Zaccaria, "A Cognitive Hybrid Model for Autonomous Navigation", Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 992, Pag. 303-314, Springer-Verlag, 1995
48. P. Morasso, F. Giuffrida, G. Vercelli, R. Zaccaria, "Safety of man-robot interaction in a domotic application" (invited paper), Proceedings of International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, ICANN'95, Paris, October 1995
49. R. Zaccaria, "Robotica e Intelligenza Artificiale", in "Intelligenza Artificiale: Stato dell'Arte e Prospettive", O. Stock ed., Franco Angeli, 1994 (in Italian)
50. A. Camurri, P. Franchi, F. Gandolfo, R. Zaccaria, "Petri Net based process scheduling: a model for the control system of flexible manufacturing systems", Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, Vol. 8 no. 1, 99-123, Kluwer Academic, August 1993
51. A. Camurri, M. Frixione, R. Zaccaria, "A music knowledge representation system combining symbolic and analogic approaches", Computers and the Humanities Journal, 27: 19-24, Kluwer Academic, 1993
52. A. Camurri, G. Vercelli, R. Zaccaria, "Real Time Knowledge Representation and Reasoning about Real Tasks", Proceedings of European Conference on Artificial Intelligence ECAI92, Vienna, Austria, 1992
53. A. Camurri, C. Innocenti, C. Massucco, R. Zaccaria, "A software architecture for sound and music processing", Microprocessing and Microprogramming - The EUROMICRO Journal, Vol. 35 no. 1-5, 625-632, North-Holland, 1992
54. E. Ardizzone, A. Camurri, M. Frixione, R. Zaccaria, "A hybrid scheme for action representation, International Journal of Intelligent Systems, Vol. 8 371-403, John Wiley, 1992
55. P. Morasso, G. Vercelli, R. Zaccaria, "Hybrid systems for robot planning" (invited paper), Proceedings of International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (North-Holland), Brighton, UK, Sept. 4-7, 1992
56. A. Camurri, C. Canepa, M. Frixione, R. Zaccaria: "HARP: a system for intelligent composer's assistance", IEEE Computer, July 1991
57. R. Zaccaria, "Verso una Rappresentazione della Conoscenza Motoria", Sistemi Intelligenti, Il Mulino, April 1990 (in Italian)
58. A. Camurri, M. Frixione, G. Vercelli, R. Zaccaria, "Some Concepts in Analogic Planning in Assembly Tasks", Proceedings of European Conf. on Artificial Intelligence ECAI90, Stockholm, Sweden, 1990
59. P. Morasso, F.A. Mussa Ivaldi, R. Zaccaria, "Redundant Robotic Manipulators. I: Regularizing by Mechanical Impedance", in "Kinematic and Dynamic Issues in Sensor Based Control", G.E.Taylor ed., NATO ASI Series F57, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1990
60. G. Adorni, A. Camurri, A. Poggi, R. Zaccaria, "Integrating Spatio-Temporal Knowledge: A Hybrid Approach", Proceedings of European Conference on Artificial Intelligence ECAI88, Munich, GFR, 1988
61. F.A. Mussa Ivaldi, P. Morasso, R. Zaccaria, "Kinematic Networks. A Distributed Model for Representing and Regularizing Motor Redundancy", Biological Cybernetics, 60, 1-16, 1988
62. G. Adorni, S. Gaglio, L. Massone, P. Morasso, R. Zaccaria, "Representing Motor Skills", Journal for the Integrated Study of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Applied Epistemology, 4, 47-71, 1987
63. A. Camurri, G. Haus, R. Zaccaria, "Describing and Performing Musical Processes by means of Petri Nets", Interface, Swets and Zeitlinger Publ., Amsterdam, Vol. 15, 1986
64. G. Marino, P. Morasso, R. Zaccaria, "Motor Knowledge Representation", Proceedings of Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI85, Los Angeles, California, 1985
65. G.Adorni, S. Gaglio, R. Zaccaria, "Towards a Description of Robot Movements By a Quasi-Natural Language", Theoretical Linguistics, Vol. 11 no. 1|2, 1984
66. G. Adorni, S. Gaglio, L. Massone, R. Zaccaria, "A Distributed System For Symbolic Computation in Robotic Vision", in "Advanced Software in Robotics", A. Danthine and M. Gerardine eds., North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1984
67. P. Morasso, V. Tagliasco, T. Vernazza, R. Zaccaria, "Tecnologie Elettriche ed Elettroniche", 220 pages, La Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1981 (in Italian)
68. M. Benati, S. Gaglio, P. Morasso, V. Tagliasco, R. Zaccaria, "Anthropomorphic Robotics II^: Analysis of Manipulator Dynamics and the Output Motor Impedance", Biological Cybernetics, vol. 38, no. 3, 1980
69. M. Benati, S. Gaglio, P. Morasso, V. Tagliasco, R. Zaccaria, "Anthropomorphic Robotics I^: Representing Mechanical Complexity, Biological Cybernetics", vol. 38, no. 3, 1980
70. P. Morasso, G. Sandini, G. Suetta, V. Tagliasco, T. Vernazza, R. Zaccaria, "LOGOS: a Microprocessor Based Device as a Writing Aid for Motor Handicapped", Medical & Biological Engineering and Computing, vol. 16, no. 3, 1978
71. P. Morasso, G. Sandini, V. Tagliasco, R. Zaccaria, "Control Strategies in the Motor System, IEEE Transactions on System, Man and Cybernetics", vol. SMC-7, no. 9, 1977