My name is Giacomo Ichino, I am 25 years old, and I grew up in a little town close to Florence in the Tuscan countryside. Growing up in close contact with nature made me develop a great interest for adventures and challenges, that I seek in everything I do in my life. During high school I became a wild water kayaking athlete for the Italian junior national team. Doing sport at such high level gave me the ability to optimally organize my time under pressure and made me realize how important it is to set goals in life and to work as hard as possible to achieve them. Above all, I loved kayaking because it taught me how powerful nature can be, how mandatory it is to respect it and the importance, in life, of being aware of all the possible scenarios we could end up in.

I moved to Turin when I was 19 years old to study at the Politecnico of Torino, one of the most renowned Italian engineering universities. I enrolled in the Physical Engineering bachelor’s degree because physics fascinated me since high school, but I later came to realize that I am more interested in engineering than in physics. For this reason, as soon as I obtained my bachelor’s degree in September of 2019, I enrolled in the Mechatronic Engineering master’s degree, still at the Politecnico of Torino. Focusing my specialization in Estimation, Control and Vision-Based navigation, I spent the first semester of the second year of my master’s degree at the Technion University, in Israel, thanks to an Erasmus+ scholarship.

My growing interest in Guidance Navigation and Control (GNC) systems together with the goal of working in the space industry led me to a thesis project in Vision-Based GNC systems for CubeSat nanosatellites. I worked for eight months under the supervision of two advisors: Dr. Elisa Capello, assistant professor at the Politecnico of Torino, and Dr. Hyeongjun Park, assistant professor at the New Mexico State University. I developed a Simulink-based simulator for 3U CubeSat docking missions, in which the performance of a Vision-Based Navigation solution involving a camera and LEDs’ patterns is analyzed. You can find the complete abstract at the end of this motivation letter. In December 2021 I defended my thesis at the Politecnico of Torino, and I graduated with an evaluation of 110/110 Cum Laude. On February 1st, 2022 I started working as Software Engineer for Alten, in Milan. Currently, I am reviewing and writing the documentation of a C language software, dealing with communication protocols, embedded electronics, and software testing campaigns.