Pietro Fanti

I worked as a YGT in Artificial Intelligence at the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) from October 2024 to December 2025.

Starting in May 2026, I am pursuing a PhD at Politecnico di Milano on Neural Shape Reconstruction and Gravity Modelling for Spacecraft Navigation in Unknown Environments, while continuing my collaboration with the ACT.

My background is in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence: I obtained my Bachelor from the University of Florence and my MSc from the University of Bologna. Before joining ESA, I worked for two years as an AI Research Engineer in computer vision, where I moved from image enhancement tasks to a stronger focus on generative models.

Feel free to contact me by e-mail. (tni.imilop@itnaforteip).

Research at the Advanced Concepts Team

• Pietro Fanti, Dario Izzo:
  MasconCube: Fast and accurate gravity modeling with an explicit representation
  Astrodynamics (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42064-025-0301-5
  [Open Access Journal] [arXiv]
• Pietro Fanti, Leon BS Williams, Ondřej Dvořák, Marcus Märtens, Tat-Jun Chin, Hongbo Ji, Bofei Chen, Dongyu Xie, Kaifan Qiao, Bohao Li, Nils Einecke, Subramanian Arumugam, Amulya Ratna Padhy, Sumeet Kumar Rath, Swati Sonal Mahapatra, Dario Izzo:
  Event-based lunar optical flow egomotion estimation challenge: design and results of the ELOPE competition
  npj Space Exploration 2, 18 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44453-026-00033-0
  [Open Access Journal]
• Sean Cowan, Pietro Fanti, Leon B. S. Williams, Chit Hong Yam, Kaneyasu Asakuma, Yuichiro Nada, Dario Izzo:
  Vision-Guided Optic Flow Navigation for Small Lunar Missions
  to appear in Astrodynamics
  [arXiv]