Mario Malizia

• I grew up in Cosenza, Italy, a beautiful city in the sunny South of Italy.
• I later moved to Milan where I pursued my BSc and MSc studies in Automation and Control Engineering at Politecnico di Milano.
• After my MSc, I worked as a Research Assistant at the Politecnico di Milano mOve Group, focusing on simulations and perception for autonomous driving applications in on-road and off-road environments.
• I am currently a Research Engineer at the Royal Military Academy (RMA) of Belgium, focusing on autonomous robotics applications within the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group.
• In parallel, I have started a joint PhD with the KU Leuven ACRO research group, supervised by Prof. Eric Demeester and Prof. Nikolaos Tsiogkas on the KUL side and Prof. Rob Haelterman and Dr. Ken Hasselmann on the RMA side.

Research Interests

Publications

MineInsight: A Multi-Sensor Dataset for Humanitarian Demining Robotics in Off-Road Environments (2025)

Mario Malizia, Charles Hamesse, Ken Hasselmann, Geert De Cubber, Nikolaos Tsiogkas, Eric Demeester, and Rob Haelterman

IEEE RA-L

Paper GitHub

PFM-1 Landmine Detection in Vegetation Using Thermal Imaging with Limited Training Data (2025)

Mario Malizia, Ken Hasselmann, Alessandra Miuccio, Rob Haelterman, Nikolaos Tsiogkas, and Eric Demeester

ICCAS Oral

Paper

HADRON: Human-friendly Control and Artificial Intelligence for Military Drone Operations (2024)

Ana M. Casado Faulí, Mario Malizia, Ken Hasselmann, Emile Le Flécher, Geert De Cubber, and Ben Lauwens

RO-MAN Workshop on Variable Autonomy for Human-Robot Teaming

Paper

A multi-robot system for the detection of explosive devices (2024)

Ken Hasselmann, Mario Malizia, Rafael Caballero, Fabio Polisano, Shashank Govindaraj, Jakob Stigler, Oleksii Ilchenko, Milan Bajic, and Geert De Cubber

ICRA Workshop on Field Robotics

Paper