Organised according to the Hub & Spoke model, the FAIR Foundation’s Innovation Grant programme involved four research organisations, 13 universities, five companies and the Italian National Interuniversity Consortium for Computer Science, covering a broad range of fields. These included aerospace and security, generative artificial intelligence and cognitive systems, healthcare and advanced diagnostics, finance and regulatory compliance, industry and smart manufacturing, energy and sustainability.

Leonardo played an active role in the technological development of four Spokes, introducing autonomous and adaptive systems for complex scenarios, including intelligent drones and advanced solutions for radar data processing and fusion.
 

From Technologies to Use Cases
Leonardo’s contribution spanned several technological and application areas, with a strong focus on transferring artificial intelligence from the virtual to the physical world through machine learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, multimodal AI and federated learning. Overall, the activities strengthened the development of both innovative AI technologies and new AI services in sectors of strategic importance to Italy.

A key area focused on identifying and defining innovative methodologies, algorithms and architectures based on some of the most promising research fields in the scientific literature, such as Safe and Constrained Reinforcement Learning, and applying them to autonomous drone navigation. Activities also included the definition of a drone-pursuit application scenario whose complexity represents an innovative step compared with the use cases normally adopted in the literature for these research areas.

In the context of AI applied to radar systems, model transparency was enhanced through the use of explainability tools to provide a clearer understanding of the process through which the model performs inference and classification. Attention was also paid to integrating radar systems with more advanced capabilities than those currently available by developing a suite of software tools capable of reducing design and development costs, as well as lowering radar energy consumption through a reduction in the detection threshold.

To make a significant contribution to understanding the trade-off between data quantity and quality, extensive work was carried out on developing and expanding techniques to improve the quality and diversity of the datasets used to train multimodal foundation models in the vision and language domain.

In the field of machine learning, the results achieved improve current learning methods based on continuous, non-IID data sequences, potentially subject to computational constraints across different nodes or clients that cannot share data for privacy reasons. This effort translates into smarter, more efficient and privacy-preserving systems that can benefit from continuous learning without compromising the security of sensitive data.

Taken together, these activities represent a contribution focused on enabling technologies and concrete use cases, with applications across space, industrial, environmental and security domains.

Value Generated
Leonardo’s contribution to FAIR strengthened the company’s internal expertise in emerging technologies, supported the development of innovative solutions in strategic fields and reinforced collaboration with universities and research centres. The project demonstrates how cooperation between industry and research can generate high-impact innovation, with direct benefits for security, sustainability and digital transformation.

Future Artificial Intelligence Research is a strategic initiative funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) under Directorial Decree No. 1555 of 11 October 2022, as part of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) – Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.3, “Extended Partnerships among Universities, Research Centres and Companies, and Funding for Research Projects” – and by the European Union through the NextGenerationEU fund. The project involved 24 Leonardo personnel across the company’s Genoa and Rome sites. The overall budget amounted to €1,141,005.00, with the MUR funding 65% of eligible costs.