Efficient use of energy is one of the main strategic measures not only for the conservation of fossil energy resources but also for abatement of air pollution and the slowing down of anthropogenic climate change. The requirement of primary energy to cool and to heat buildings is an important part of the overall energy consumption in Western countries, summing up to about 30% of the U.S. and European global energy consumption, due to the increasing use of air conditioning units for cooling residential and office buildings during summer.

The research activity mostly concerns the development of models and control algorithms for vehicles and vehicle components. Special emphasis is given on the use of virtual prototyping tools, including hardware- and human-in-the-loop tools. The activity is focused on four main topics:

Large frame optical gyroscopes based on He-Ne ring laser (or gyrolaser) technology are presently the most sensitive devices for measuring inertial rotational motion. The use of such systems has been considered in the past for different fundamental Physics applications including experimental tests of fundamental symmetries, axions detection, test of metric theories of gravitation, and gravitational waves detectors.  Moreover, ring lasers have been recently proposed as the core element of an innovative portable six-component sensor for designed seismological field studies: e.g.

Tokamaks are among the most promising devices for obtaining nuclear fusion energy from a high-temperature, ionized gas (plasma).In tokamaks, there are two components of the confining magnetic field. A set of toroidal field coils, evenly spaced around the torus provides a strong toroidal magnetic field that is kept constant during the whole discharge and provides for plasma stability. The second component, the poloidal field, is responsible for the equilibrium of the plasma. It is produced by the plasma current and can be shaped by using the set of Poloidal Field Coils.

Adaptive optics (AO) is used in astronomy to obtain high resolution images, close to diffraction limited, of stars and galaxies with ground telescopes, otherwise blurred by atmospheric turbulence.In order to succesfully compensate for the distorsion induced by athmospheric turbulence one (or more) deformable mirros are deformed; the control action used measurements of the wavefront distorsion.Next generation AO systems have thousand of sensors and actuators and as such pose non-trivial issues both for modeling and control.In this respect, it is important to predict the turbulent phase affec