Professor Gennaro Notomista, a former graduate of the International Automotive Engineering course, as a visiting scholar at THI

Even as a student on the International Automotive Engineering course at THI, Gennaro Notomista stood out for his outstanding performance and his clever solutions in the THI team at the "Audi Autonomous Driving Cup" competition (see picture below, 3rd from left). He completed the Master of Engineering in 2015 as the best student of the year. His Master's thesis "Parking Maneuver Planning Based on Machine Learning", which he conducted at the CARISSMA research centre, resulted in a scientific publication that was published at the "IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks" conference.

In his academic training, two more Master's degrees followed: the Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering at the University "Federico II" in Naples, Italy, in 2016 and the Master of Science in Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, in 2019. Gennaro Notomista also obtained his PhD in 2020 at the Georgia Institute of Technology, one of the most prestigious universities in the USA in the field of engineering. He remained true to his interest in autonomous systems and his doctoral thesis focused on control engineering methods and their implementation in autonomous robots. Since October 2021, Gennaro Notomista has been appointed Assistant Professor in Systems and Control at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Because his lectures in Canada do not start until spring 2022, Prof. Notomista was able to return to his alma mater in Ingolstadt for 3 months as part of a DAAD-funded scientific exchange. As a guest researcher at the Institute C-IAD, he is pursuing some research questions on safe automated driving together with Professor Botsch and his research group.  The focus is on the application of so-called "barrier functions" in optimisation tasks in order to realise guarantees for the safety of autonomously planned manoeuvres from an algorithmic and control engineering perspective. The developed algorithms are first validated in the simulation and then implemented and tested in real vehicles at the outdoor facility of CARISSMA (see picture above).

Last but not least: his motto as a student in the THI application of 2014 for the "Audi Autonomous Driving Cup" was: "Per aspera ad astra" (Through hardship one reaches the stars)...