About

Biography

Iacopo Catalano is a doctoral candidate at the University of Turku, supervised by Dr. Jorge Peña Queralta. His research focuses on perception and scene understanding for autonomous robots, in particular, hierarchical 3D and 4D scene graphs that connect geometry, semantics, and motion dynamics, and using them to bridge perception and prediction in complex, changing environments.

He received his Bachelor's degree in Physics from Sapienza University of Rome. Between 2020 and 2022, he obtained three master's degrees through the Erasmus Mundus IMLEX programme: in engineering (Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan), optics and image science (Université Jean Monnet, France), and computer science in extended reality (University of Eastern Finland). His earlier research addressed perception and state estimation for multi-robot systems, particularly UAV positioning in GNSS-denied environments.

He has since broadened his work across several institutions: as a Research Software Engineer Intern at DAAV, working on autonomous ground robotics; as a visiting researcher at the University of Zaragoza, hosted by Prof. Eduardo Montijano and Prof. Javier Civera, where he extended his work to motion forecasting in dynamic environments; and, since 2026, as a visiting researcher at Aalto University with Dr. Francesco Verdoja and Prof. Ville Kyrki.

Outside research, he served as a scout for fifteen years (five as group leader), an experience that continues to inform his approach to mentorship and teaching.