The Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines presents “Autonomous, Agile, Vision-controlled Drones: From Frame to Event Vision” by Davide Scaramuzza of the University of Zurich. The event will be held in the TSRB Banquet Hall from 12:15-1:15 p.m. and is open to the public.

Abstract

Autonomous quadrotors will soon play a major role in search-and-rescue and remote-inspection missions, where a fast response is crucial. Quadrotors have the potential to navigate quickly through unstructured environments, enter and exit buildings through narrow gaps, and fly through collapsed buildings. However, their speed and maneuverability are still far from those of birds. Indeed, agile navigation through unknown, indoor environments poses a number of challenges for robotics research in terms of perception, state estimation, planning, and control. In this talk, I will show that active vision is crucial to plan trajectories that improve the quality of perception. Also, I will talk about our recent results on event-based vision to enable low latency sensory motor control and navigation in a low light and high dynamic environment, where traditional vision sensors fail.

Bio

Davide Scaramuzza is an associate professor of robotics and perception in the departments of Informatics (University of Zurich) and Neuroinformatics (University of Zurich and ETH Zurich), where he completes research at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and neuroscience.

Scaramuzza completed his Ph.D. in robotics and computer vision at ETH Zurich under the direction of Roland Siegwart and held a postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Vijay Kumar and Kostas Daniilidis.

From 2009 to 2012, he led the European project sFly, which introduced the PX4 autopilot and pioneered visual-SLAM–based autonomous navigation of micro drones. For his research contributions, he was awarded the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, the Misha Mahowald Neuromorphic Engineering Award, the SNSF-ERC Starting Grant (equivalent to an NSF Career Award), a Google Research Award, the European Young Researcher Award, and several conference paper awards.

Scaramuzza coauthored the book Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots (published by MIT Press) and more than 100 papers on robotics and perception. In 2015, he co-founded a venture, called Zurich-Eye, dedicated to the commercialization of visual-inertial navigation solutions for mobile robots, which later became Facebook-Oculus VR.