Dario Lodi Rizzini is an Associate Professor of Robotics (SSD ING-INF/05) at the Department of Engineering and Architecture of the University of Parma, where he teaches courses in robotics and operating systems. He received his PhD in Information Technology in 2009 from the University of Parma. In 2007, he was a visiting researcher in the Autonomous and Intelligent Systems group at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, led by Professor Wolfram Burgard. Since 2015, he has held fixed-term research positions (RTD-A and RTD-B), carrying out ongoing research, teaching, and supervising doctoral students. As of December 2025, he has authored over 65 scientific publications in international journals and conferences. He serves as Associate Editor of IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, the IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), and other conferences. He has participated in and coordinated numerous research projects at national and regional levels, serving as scientific director or coordinator of units and tasks, and has conducted research in collaboration with leading industrial companies in the automation and logistics sectors.
His research focuses primarily on mobile and autonomous robotics, with significant contributions in the areas of localization and mapping (SLAM), 2D/3D perception, point cloud registration, object pose recognition and estimation, and autonomous industrial vehicle (AGV) navigation. He has developed geometric and probabilistic methods for robust localization, mapping with graphical models, feature extraction from LIDAR sensors and depth cameras, and global point cloud registration with optimality guarantees.
His research finds application in industrial, logistics, agricultural, and underwater contexts, including robots for autonomous manipulation, vision systems for complex environments, precision agriculture, and field robotics. He is also active in the development and public release of scientific software and datasets to support the research community.