PhD defense Giovanni di Dio Cioffi
Congratulations to Giovanni di Dio Cioffi for defending his PhD thesis “Visual SLAM: Geometry vs. Learning” 🎉
In his dissertation, Giovanni di Dio Cioffi investigates how Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (V-SLAM), a foundational technology for autonomous robotics and AR/VR, can be made more robust in visually challenging environments characterized by low texture, extreme motion, and adverse illumination conditions.
His work advances both multi-modal geometric fusion and data-driven learning approaches. On the geometric side, he proposes novel frameworks that tightly couple visual-inertial data with global positioning, digital twins, and hybrid vehicle dynamics models. On the learning side, he introduces reinforcement learning to dynamically adapt system parameters to changing operational conditions and identifies key architectural drivers behind deep learning-based SLAM.
Giovanni was a PhD student in the Robotics and Perception Group, supervised by Prof. Davide Scaramuzza.