Gabriele Ermacora

About

Gabriele Ermacora is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of cloud robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and smart city technologies. His most significant contributions center on designing cloud-based architectures that enable autonomous robots—particularly drones—to perform emergency management, monitoring, and surveillance tasks in urban environments. Through the Fly4SmartCity project, Ermacora pioneered practical frameworks for deploying small UAVs as intelligent service agents connected to remote computing infrastructure, advancing the idea that robots need not carry heavy onboard processing when cloud resources are available. Among his most cited contributions, his 2016 paper "Fly4SmartCity: A Cloud Robotics Service for Smart City Applications" and his earlier 2013 architecture paper have each garnered nearly 20 citations, reflecting sustained interest from the robotics and ICT communities. His exploration of sliding autonomy—allowing dynamic control handoffs between human operators and autonomous systems—adds an important human-robot interaction dimension to his portfolio. More recently, Ermacora has expanded into autonomous navigation evaluation, applying convolutional neural networks to assess environmental complexity for mobile robots. From aerial projectors to domestic robot companions, his research consistently bridges theoretical robotics frameworks with tangible real-world applications, making his work valuable for students and practitioners shaping the future of urban robotic services.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Fly4SmartCity: A cloud robotics service for smart city applications

   22 citations · 2016
2. 2
   A Cloud Based Service for Management and Planning of Autonomous UAV Missions in Smart City Scenarios

   19 citations · 2014
3. 3
   A cloud robotics architecture for an emergency management and monitoring service in a smart cityenvironment

   19 citations · 2013
4. 4
   Sliding Autonomy in Cloud Robotics Services for Smart City Applications

   17 citations · 2015
5. 5
   Micro Aerial Projector - stabilizing projected images of an airborne robotics projection platform

   8 citations · 2016
6. 6
   Leveraging Open Data for Supporting a Cloud Robotics Service in a Smart City Environment

   7 citations · 2015
7. 7
   An Evaluation Framework to Assess Autonomous Navigation Linked to Environment Complexity

   7 citations · 2020
8. 8
   Advances in Human Robot Interaction for Cloud Robotics applications

   4 citations · 2016
9. 9
   A CNN Approach to Assess Environment Complexity for Robotics Autonomous Navigation

   3 citations · 2020
10. 10
    From a Robotic Vacuum Cleaner to Robot Companion

    2 citations · 2015

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links