Vanessa Staderini is the first woman to successfully complete her PhD at the AIT Center for Vision, Automation & Control—achieving an outstanding result. Working at the intersection of computer vision, control engineering, and robotics, she is driving a key research focus of the Center: robust, high-performance inspection solutions for demanding industrial production environments. Her achievement highlights the value and excellence women bring to engineering and technology—and reflects the growing strength of diverse talent in cutting-edge technical research.
When I first came to AIT, I was excited, but I never imagined this journey would be so fast, rewarding, and fun.
(Vanessa Staderini)
New technology delivering direct value to industry
High cycle times, complex geometries, occlusions, and demanding surfaces push classic inspection methods to their limits. In her dissertation, Vanessa Staderini developed an integrated, model-based framework that derives inspection viewpoints and robot trajectories directly from CAD data and sensor specifications. This achieves high coverage at a defined spatial resolution – using as few viewpoints as possible to keep cycle times short. This enables fast, precise optical inline inspection while saving resources and energy.
What makes the approach unique is that the solution combines all key requirements in a single planning pipeline: geometry-based pose generation, quality assessment (e.g., resolution/photometry), kinematic feasibility, and the joint optimization of coverage and robot-feasible motion. The process is explainable, repeatable, and fully model-based—as well as robot- and sensor-independent for broad industrial deployment.
Excellence proven through commitment and awards
Staderini’s excellence is reflected not only in her research, but also in her international engagement. Already as a PhD student, she advocated for greater visibility for women in computer vision and robotics – among other roles, as a member of the organizing committee of Women in Computer Vision (WiCV) in the context of the CVPR (Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition), one of the most prestigious conferences in this field. She co-organized the WiCV workshop, represented the research at trade fairs, and served as a role model for women in engineering and technology.
Her contributions have also been recognized with multiple awards, including a Best Paper Award at IEEE ICPRS (International Conference on Pattern Recognition Systems) 2023 and the Best Women in engineering paper at the International Conference on Computer Vision Systems IEEE & AIT Best Paper Award 2023.
We warmly congratulate Dr. techn. Vanessa Staderini on this milestone and are delighted that she is continuing her research at AIT— bridging robotics and computer vision within the research groups Complex Dynamical Systems and High-Performance Vision Systems at the Center for Vision, Automation & Control.
Title of dissertation:
“Integrated Planning and Optimization Framework for Robotic Visual Inspection”
Examination board:
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Andreas Kugi
Associate Professor Markus Vincze, PhD
Prof. Fulvio Mastrogiovanni / University of Genoa
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ernst Csencsics