Discovering and exploring scientific and technological research applications in sport. This was the aim of Sportech 2025 , which was held from 22 to 24 January at the National Youth Sports Centre in Tenero. The Software Institute of the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) also participated in the event, with an interactive workshop on autonomous driving .
Now in its ninth edition, this year Sportech once again hosted over forty interactive workshops in which pupils from middle, vocational and secondary schools were able to experience numerous technological applications through practical tests related to various sports disciplines, offering interesting links to the curriculum content of some taught subjects.
The Sportech workshops cover a variety of topics: biomechanics and physics; communication; the human body, sports medicine and physiology; technical aids; neuroscience and psychology; rehabilitation and prevention; Training & Exercise Science; nutrition and much more. For each field, educational activities are proposed that share a highly interactive dimension, enabling participants to learn about the concepts and technological applications used in sport and beyond in a practical and entertaining way.
One of the central themes of the near future is without doubt autonomous driving, and USI’s Software Institute aims to be at the forefront in this field too. The research and experimentation carried out at the Software Institute in this field, as well as the objective of the laboratory presented at Sportech, are aimed at stimulating curiosity towards the topics of autonomous driving and artificial intelligence (AI).
This curiosity was satisfied during the three-day event, where the numerous participants were introduced to autonomous driving functions, including machine learning software algorithms, through the use of 1:16 scale models. "What we are trying to do is to make students aware of what autonomous driving consists of," explains Roberto Minelli , Academic Coordinator of the Software Institute, "We put them through the training process, i.e. collecting the data that the algorithm needs to learn, and then we move the model to a server, creating an AI model and demonstrate it at work by fitting it to the car. What is new this year is that instead of having a physical circuit we have a projection of it, with the advantage of being able to change it and run the car on different circuits. In addition, if you change the track while the car is running it can also adapt to the circuit it has never seen, running autonomously".
Sportech 2025: sports technology and autonomous driving with USI
