News
September 15, 2021
New Arxiv Preprint: Expertise Affects Drone Racing Performance
We present an analysis of drone racing performance of professional and beginner pilots. Our results show that professional pilots consistently outperform beginner pilots and choose more optimal racing lines. Our results provide strong evidence for a contribution of expertise to performances in real-world human-piloted drone racing. We discuss the implications of these results for future work on autonomous fast and agile flight. For more details, check out the
paper.
September 13, 2021
Our work was selected as IEEE Transactions on Robotics 2020 Best Paper Award finalist
Honored that our IEEE Transactions on Robotics 2020 paper "Deep Drone Racing: From Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization" was selected Best Paper Award finalist! Congratulations to all collaborators for this great achievement!
PDF YouTube 1 YouTube 2 Code
September 13, 2021
IROS2021 Workshop: Integrated Perception, Learning, and Control for Agile Super Vehicles
Do not miss our IROS2021 Workshop: Integrated Perception, Learning, and Control for Agile Super Vehicles!
Checkout the agenda and join the presentations at our
workshop website.
Organized by Giuseppe Loianno, Davide Scaramuzza, Sertac Karaman.
The workshop is on October the 1st and starts at 5pm Zurich time
(GMT+2).
September 13, 2021
New Arxiv Preprint: Range, Endurance, and Optimal Speed Estimates for Multicopters
We present an approach to accurately estimate the range, endurance, and optimal flight speed
for general multicopters. This is made possible by combining a state-of-the-art first-principles
aerodynamic multicopter model with an eletric-motor model and a precise graybox battery model.
Additionally, we present an accurate pen-and-paper algorithm developed based on the complex model
to estimate the range, endurance, and optimal speed of multicopters.
For more details, check out the
paper.
September 10, 2021
New Arxiv Preprint: Performance, Precision, and Payloads: Adaptive Nonlinear MPC for
Quadrotors
We propose L1-NMPC, a novel hybrid adaptive NMPC to learn model uncertainties online and
immediately compensate for them, drastically
improving performance over non-adaptive baselines with minimal computational overhead.
Our proposed architecture generalizes to many different environments from which we evaluate
wind, unknown payloads, and highly agile flight conditions.
For more details, check out the
paper and
video.
September 9, 2021
New Arxiv Preprint: A Comparative Study of Nonlinear MPC and Differential-Flatness-Based
Control for Quadrotor Agile Flight
We perform a comparative study of two state-of-the-art control methods for quadrotor agile
flights from the aspect of trajectory tracking accuracy, robustness, and computational
efficiency.
A wide variety of agile trajectories are tracked in this research at speeds up to 72 km/h. We
show the superiority of NMPC in tracking dynamically infeasible trajectories at the cost of
higher
computation time and risk of numerical convergence issues. An inner-loop controller using the
incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) is proposed to hybridize with both methods,
demonstrating more than 78% tracking error reduction. Non-expert readers can regard this work as
a tutorial on agile quadrotor flight.
For more details, check out the
paper and
video.
September 8, 2021
New Arxiv Preprint: Model Predictive Contouring Control for Near-Time-Optimal Quadrotor
Flight
We propose a Model Predictive Contouring Control (MPCC) method fly time-optimal trajectories
through multiple waypoints with quadrotors.
Our MPCC optimally selects the future states of the platform at runtime, while maximizing the
progress along the reference path and minimizing the distance to it.
We show that, even when tracking simplified trajectories, the proposed MPCC results in a path
that approaches the true time-optimal one, and which can be generated in real-time.
We validate our approach in the real-world, where we show that our method outperforms both the
current state-of-the-art and a world-class human pilot in terms of lap time achieving speeds of
up to 60 km/h.
For more details, check out the
paper and
video.
September 7, 2021
New Arxiv Preprint: Bridging the Gap between Events and Frames through Unsupervised Domain
Adaptation
To overcome the shortage of event-based datasets, we propose a task transfer method that
allows models to be trained directly with labeled images and unlabeled event data.
Our method transfers from single images to events and does not rely on paired sensor data.
Thus, our approach unlocks the vast amount of image datasets for the training of event-based
neural networks.
For more details, check out the paper and video.
September 2, 2021
HILTI-SLAM Challenge: win up to $10,000 prize money and keynote invitation
RPG and HILTI are organizing the IROS2021 HILTI SLAM Challenge! Participants can win up to
$10,000 prize money and a keynote IROS workshop invitation! Instructions here.
The HILTI SLAM Challenge dataset is a real-life, multi-sensor dataset with accurate ground
truth to advance the state of the art in highly accurate state estimation in challenging
environments. Participants will be ranked by the completeness of their trajectories and by
the achieved accuracy.
HILTI is a multinational company that offers premium
products and services for professionals on construction sites around the globe. Behind this
vast catalog is a global team comprising of 30.000 team members from 133 different
nationalities located in more than 120 countries.
August 29, 2021
New Arxiv Preprint: Dense Optical Flow from Event Cameras
We propose a novel method to estimate dense optical flow from events only, alongside an
extension of DSEC for optical flow estimation.
Our approach takes inspiration from frame-based methods and outperforms previous event-based
approaches with up to 66% EPE reduction.
For more details, check out the paper and video.
August 20, 2021
New IROS Paper & Code Release: Powerline Tracking with Event Cameras
We propose a method that uses event cameras to robustly track lines and show an application
for powerline tracking.
Our method identifies lines in the stream of events by detecting planes in the
spatio-temporal signal, and tracks them through time.
For more details, check out the paper and video.
We release the code fully open
source.
August 17, 2021
Davide Scaramuzza invited speaker at Real Roboticist
The series Real Roboticist, produced by the 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS),
shows the people at the forefront of robotics research from a more personal perspective.
In his talk, Davide Scaramuzza explains his journey from Electronics Engineering to leading
a top robotics vision research group developing a promising technology: event cameras.
He also speaks about the challenges he faced along the way, and even how he combines the
robotics research with another of his passions, magic.
Read
the article and
watch the talk. Enjoy!
August 6, 2021
RPG Contributes to CARLA Optical Flow Camera
CARLA is the world leading simulator for autonomous driving, developed by Intel.
Our lab contributed to the implementation of the optical flow camera,
requested by the community
since the inception the simulator.
Check out the release video for a short
teaser and the documention
for more information on how to use it.
July 21, 2021
Time-Optimal Quadrotor Planning faster than Humans
We are excited to announce our latest work on agile flight
allowing us to generate "time-optimal quadrotor trajectories",
which are faster than human drone racing pilots!
Our novel algorithm published in Science Robotics uses a
progress-based formulation to generate time-optimal trajectories
through multiple waypoints while exploiting, but not violating
the quadrotor's actuator constraints.
Check out our real-world
agile flight footage with explanations and find the
details in the paper
on Science Robotics.
June 30, 2021
The World's Largest Indoor Drone-Testing Arena
We are excited to announce our new, indoor, drone-testing arena!
Equipped with a real-time motion-capture system consisting of 36
Vicon cameras, and with a flight space of over 30x30x8 meters
(7,000 cubic meters), this large research infrastructure allows
us to deploy our most advanced perception, learning, planning,
and control algorithms to push vision-based agile drones to
speeds over 60 km/h and accelerations over 5g.
It also allows us to fly in an unlimited number of virtual
environments using hardware-in-the-loop simulation.
Among the many projects we are currently working on, we aim to
beat the best professional human pilot in a drone race.
Turn up the volume and enjoy the video!
And stay tuned... the best is about to come.. very soon!
June 25, 2021
New RSS Paper & Dataset Release: NeuroBEM
We are happy to announce the release of the full dataset
associated with our upcoming RSS paper NeuroBEM:
Hybrid
Aerodynamic Quadrotor Model.
The dataset features over 1h15min of highly aggressive maneuvers
recorded at high accuracy in one of the worlds largest optical
tracking volumes.
We provide time-aligned quadrotor state and motor-commands
recorded at 400Hz in a curated dataset.
For more details, check out our paper, dataset and video.
June 25, 2021
Fast Feature Tracking with ROS
Our work on GPU-optmized feature detection and tracking is now
available as a simple ROS node.
It implements GPU-optimized Fast, Harris, and Shi-Tomasi
detectors and KLT tracking, running at hundreds of FPS on a
Jetson TX2.
For more details, check out our paper Faster than FAST
and
code.
June 11, 2021
TimeLens: Event-based Video Frame Interpolation
TimeLens is a new
event-based video frame interpolation method that generates high
speed video from
low framerate RGB frames and asynchronous events. Learn more
about TimeLens over at our project page
where you can find code, datasets and more!
We also release a High-Speed Event and RGB dataset which
features complex scenarios like bursting balloons and spinning
objects!
June 10, 2021
Video
recordings of the ICRA 2021 Workshop on Perception
and Action in Dynamic Environments are now available!
On June 4, 2021, Antonio Loquercio (RPG), Davide Scaramuzza
(RPG), Luca Carlone (MIT), and Markus Ryll (TUM)
organized the 1st International Workshop on Perception and
Action in Dynamic Environments at ICRA.
May 18, 2021
Workshop on Perception and Action in Dynamic Environments
Do not miss our #ICRA2021 workshop on Perception and Action in
Dynamic Environments!
Checkout the agenda and join the presentations at our
workshop website.
Organized by Antonio Loquercio, Davide Scaramuzza, Markus Ryll,
Luca Carlone.
The workshop is on June the 4th and starts at 4pm Zurich time
(GMT+2).
May 18, 2021
CVPR competition on stereo matching
We are delighted to announce our CVPR event-based vision
workshop competition on disparity/depth prediction on the new DSEC dataset. Visit
our website
for more details about the competition.
Submission deadline is the 11th of June.
May 18, 2021
Davide Scaramuzza listed among the most influential scholars in
robotics
Congratulations to our lab director, Davide Scaramuzza, for being
listed among the 100 most influential robotics scholar by Aminer
[ Link ].
May 11, 2021
Antonio Loquercio successfully passed his PhD defense
Congratulations to Antonio Loquercio, who has successfully defended
his PhD dissertation titled
"Agile Autonomy: Learning Tightly-Coupled Perception-Action for
High-Speed Quadrotor Flight in the Wild", on May. 10, 2021.
We thank the reviewers: Prof. Pieter Abbeel, Prof. Angela
Schoellig and Prof. Roland Siegwart!
The full video of the PhD defense
presentation is on YouTube.
May 10, 2021
IEEE Transactions on Robotics Best Paper Award Honorable Mention
Our paper Deep Drone Racing: from Simulation to Reality with
Domain Randomization wins the prestigious IEEE Transactions on
Robotics Best Paper Award Honorable Mention: PDF YouTube 1 YouTube 2 Code
May 7, 2021
How to Calibrate Your Event Camera
We propose a generic event camera calibration frame-work using
image reconstruction.
Check out our Code and
PDF
April 30, 2021
DodgeDrone Challenge
We have organized a challenge to push current state of the art
for agile navigation in dynamic environments.
In this challenge, drones will have to avoid moving boulders
while flying in a forest!
Deadline for submission is June the 1st! The winner will
be awarded with a Skydio2!
Partecipate now at https://uzh-rpg.github.io/PADE-ICRA2021/ddc/!
April 26, 2021
Read how our research inspired Ingenuity's flight on Mars
Our research inspired the design of the vision-based navigation
technology behind the Ingenuity helicopter that flew on Mars.
Read the full article on SwissInfo [ English ],
[ Italian ].
April 23, 2021
NASA collaborates with RPG
Our lab is collaborating with NASA/JPL to investigate event
cameras for the next Mars helicopter missions! Read full
interview on SwissInfo with Davide Scaramuzza [ Link ].
April 23, 2021
Davide Scaramuzza invited speaker at GRASP on Robotics
Davide Scaramuzza talks about "Autonomous, Agile Micro Drones:
Perception, Learning, and Control" at GRASP
on Robotics seminar series organized by the GRASP laboratory at
University of Pennsylvania.
In this talk, he shows how the combination of both model-based
and machine learning methods united with
the power of new, low-latency sensors, such as event cameras,
can allow drones to achieve unprecedented
speed and robustness by relying solely on onboard computing.
Watch the
presentation! Enjoy!
April 14, 2021
DSEC: Event Camera Dataset is Out!
DSEC is a new driving dataset with stereo VGA event cameras, RGB
global shutter cameras and disparity
groundtruth from Lidar.
Download DSEC now to reap
the benefits of this multi-modal
dataset with high-quality calibration.
We also accompany the dataset with code and
documentation.
Check out our video,
and
paper
too! Stay tuned for more!
March 18, 2021
Autonomous Drone Racing with Deep Reinforcement Learning
We present Autonomous Drone Racing with Deep RL, the first
learning-based method that can
achieve near-time-optimal performance in drone racing. Checkout
the Preprint
and the Video.
March 15, 2021
1st Workshop on Perception and Action in Dynamic Environments at
ICRA 2021
We organized a #ICRA2021 workshop on perception and action
dynamic environments!
We brought together amazing keynote speakers and also organized
a competition on drone navigation in a
forest (Prize is a Skydio2)! All we need is you!
Check out our website here
for more info and the
current list of invited speakers.
March 8, 2021
Check out our work on Visual Processing and Control in Human Drone
Pilots!
Our work on Visual Processing and Control in Human Drone Pilots
has been accepted in the IEEE Robotics and
Automation Letters. Check out our Video, the Paper, and
Open-Source Dataset
too!
February 19, 2021
Check out our Event Camera Simulator, ESIM, now with python bindings
and GPU support!
Our event camera simulator ESIM now features python
bindings and GPU support for fully parallel event
generation! Check out our
project page, code
and
paper.
February 12, 2021
Check out our work on Combining Events and Frames using Recurrent
Asynchronous Multimodal Networks!
Our work on combining events and frames using recurrent
asynchronous multimodal networks has been accepted
in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. Check out the paper, the
project page,
and the source
code.
February 12, 2021
Check out our work on data-driven MPC for quadrotors!
Our work on data-driven MPC for quadrotors has been accepted in
the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
Check out the paper, the
video, and the
source code.
February 09, 2021
Our work on autonomous flight despite motor failure is featured on
IEEE Spectrum
Our latest work on autonomous quadrotor flight despite rotor
failure with onboard vision sensors (frames
or event cameras) was featured on IEEE
Spectrum. For more details, read the paper here
and watch the video here.
Source code here.
January 25, 2021
3rd Workshop on Event-based Vision at CVPR 2021
We are organizing the "3rd Workshop on Event-based Vision",
which will take place in June at CVPR2021. The
paper submission deadline is March 27. Check out our website here
for more info and the current list of invited
speakers.
January 14, 2021
Check out our work in the new Flying Arena!
Davide Scaramuzza and some of the lab's members talk about our
work on drone racing in the new Flying
Arena. Watch Davide Scaramuzza interview here.
Watch Elia Kaufmann
interview here.
Watch Christian Pfeiffer interview here.
January 13, 2021
Check out our work on how to keep drones flying when a motor fails!
Our work on controlling a quadrotor after motor failure with
only onboard vision sensors has been
accepted in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. Check out
the paper, the video, and the
source code.
January 12, 2021
Paper accepted in IJCV!
Our work on generating accurate reference poses for visual
localization datasets has been accepted in the
International Journal of Computer Vision. Check out the paper here,
and the Aachen Day-Night v1.1 dataset in the paper can be
accessed via the online visual
localization benchmark service.
January 11, 2021
Check our new startup SUIND!
We are super excited to announce SUIND, our latest spin-off!
Leveraging years of research in our lab,
SUIND is building a groundbreaking safety suite for drones.
Proud to see our former members Kunal
Shrivastava and Kevin Kleber making a true impact in the
industry! Read more
here.
December 4, 2020
Titus Cieslewski successfully passed his Ph.D. defense
Congratulations to Titus Cieslewski, who has successfully
defended his PhD dissertation titled
"Decentralized Multi-Agent Visual SLAM", on Nov. 30, 2020. We
thank the reviewers: Prof. Marc Pollefeys
and Prof. Torsten Sattler!
Titus' major contributions have been:
- The first O(n²) → O(n) decentralized place
recognition algorithm for multi-agent SLAM.
- A "succinct" feature detector, named SIPs, that extracts a
minimal set of feature points to enable
accurate camera localization.
- A completely new approach to feature detection and
matching, named IMPs, where features that are
implicitly matched between images are detected, thus
rendering feature descriptors obsolete in the
considered application case.
- A data representation for exploration which enables
exploration using a globally inconsistent
state estimate, thus showing that optimization is not
needed for exploration.
The full video of the PhD defense
presentation is on YouTube.
November 30, 2020
Event Cameras meet the CARLA simulator
Autonomous cars equipped with event cameras are now possible
with our new CARLA simulator plugin! Based on
ESIM
and available since CARLA
0.9.10.
The sensor generates synthetic events in photorealistic
self-driving scenarios at any temporal resolution.
You might use our script in
here to generate reliable data in
CARLA and create your own dataset.
A step forward to bring event cameras into autonomous driving
research!
November 28, 2020
Code Release of E2DEPTH
We have released the code of our 3DV 2020 paper
Learning Monocular Dense
Depth from Events, where we propose a
supervised learning approach
using a recurrent network to leverage the temporal consistency
in the events and estimate single-camera
dense depth!
The code is available in GitHub!
November 18, 2020
Davide Scaramuzza invited speaker at Robotics Today
Davide Scaramuzza talks about Learning to Fly at the Robotics
Today's seminar series organized by MIT and
Stanford.
He covers topics ranging from perception to planning and
control, from model-based to model-free autonomy.
He shows how to learn sensorimotor policies end-to-end directly
in simulation, which transfer to real
drones without any fine-tuning,
thanks to the use of appropriate sensory abstractions. He talks
about the role of simulation.
Finally, he shows the latest and greatest on event cameras to
enable low-latency agile flight.
Watch the
presentation! Enjoy!
November 18, 2020
Robohub interviews Davide Scaramuzza
Are you curious about the people behind the robots? The 2020
IEEE/RSJ International
Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) features a
new Original Series called
Real Roboticist hosted by Sabine Hauert, President of Robohub
and faculty at University of
Bristol, where she interviews different roboticists
individually. Watch
the one with Davide
Scaramuzza!
November 2-3, 2020
Join our IROS2020 Workshop on Perception, Learning, and Control for
Autonomous Agile
Vehicles on Nov. 2-3, 2020!
Join our IROS 2020 workshop "Perception, Learning, and Control
for Autonomous Agile
Vehicles"
on November 2 and 3 via ZOOM organized by Loianno Giuseppe,
Davide Scaramuzza, and Sertac
Karaman.
It will cover both ground and flying super agile vehicles.
We have an incredible line of speakers from both academia and
industry!
We will award a $500 USD to the best workshop paper.
A Field Robotics Special Issue will be organized after the
workshop (submissions open to
everyone).
WHEN: November 2nd and November 3rd, 2020, from 16:00hrs to
20:00hrs Zurich time (10am to
2pm New York time).
WHERE: ZOOM.
Workshop webpage.
October 26, 2020
Code Release of PD-MeshNet
We have just released the code of our NeurIPS 2020 paper Primal-Dual
Mesh Convolutional Neural Networks.
Our network architecture obtains state-of-the-art results in the
tasks of shape
classification and segmentation!
If you are interested in 3D data processing and geometric deep
learning, you should try our
code out!
The code is available at this
page!
October 05, 2020
Code Release for High-MPC
We release the open-source
code
for High-MPC: Learning High-level Policies for Model Predictive
Control. Checkout the video and paper for more
details.
September 26, 2020
We are hiring!
Come build the future of robotics with us!
We have three fully-funded openings for PhD students and
Postdocs in computer vision and
machine learning
to contribute to the areas of:
- Autonomous drone racing,
- Autonomous inspection of power lines,
- SLAM, Scene Understanding, and Computational Photography
with Event Cameras.
Job descriptions and how to apply.
September 08, 2020
Code Release for Fisher Information Field
We release the open-source
code
for Fisher Information Field - an efficient and differentiable
map for
perception-aware planning. Checkout the video and
paper
for more details.
September 03, 2020
Code Release for Flightmare: A Flexible Quadrotor Simulator
We release our open-source quadrotor simulator Flightmare:
A Flexible Quadrotor
Simulator.
Checkout the Website
for more details.
July 27, 2020
Vision Systems article about our dynamic obstacle avoidance drone
Event cameras enable fast image processing and nimble movement.
Here is the Link
to the article.
July 26, 2020
Blog Post About Deep Drone Acrobatics
Do you want to know how to make autonomous drones fly acrobatics
maneuvers?
Check out this blog
post!
Teaser: All you need is a drone simulator!
July 23, 2020
Code Release for VIMO: Simultaneous Visual Inertial Model-based
Odometry and Force
Estimation
We released our open-source example implementation of VIMO
extends VINS-Mono
to
estimate external forces along with robot state. Instructions to
run the code are in the
github repository.
July 16, 2020
Best Systems Paper Award at RSS and Best Paper Award Finalist!
Our paper AlphaPilot: Autonomous Drone Racing (Paper, Presentation)
won the Best System
Paper Award at RSS!
Additionally, our paper Deep Drone Acrobatics (Paper,
Presentation)
was finalist for the
Best Paper Award.
June 24, 2020
Davide Scaramuzza participates in the ICRA20 Debate on the Future of
Robotics Research!
Is "robotics research over-reliant on benchmark datasets and
simulation"? Check out here
what RPG director Davide Scaramuzza has to say: Video.
The debate had over 1100 online
viewers!
June 11, 2020
Deep Drone Acrobatics paper at RSS 2020!
Drones with on-board sensing and computation can now fly agile
acrobatic maneuvers!
Check out our RSS 2020 paper Deep Drone
Acrobatics
to understand what made this possible!
A video of the experiments is available at this
link.
If you also want to do acrobatics with drones, please check out
the project's
code!
June 2, 2020
We are hiring!
Come build the future of robotics with us!
We have several fully-funded openings for PhD students and
Postdocs in control, path
planning, aerodynamic modelling, numerical optimization,
computer vision, and machine learning to contribute to the areas
of:
- Autonomous drone racing,
- Autonomous inspection of power lines,
- Computational photography.
Job descriptions and how to apply.
June 2, 2020
Results of ICRA 2020 UZH FPV Competition Available
The winner is OKVIS 2.0 by the Smart Robotics Lab, Imperial
College, London, closely
followed by OpenVINS from the University of Delaware and with
OSU-ETHZ, a joint team from
the Ohio State University and ETH Zurich, on a close third rank.
See detailed
results on the dataset page.
May 28, 2020
RSS20 Workshop on Agile Super Vehicles, Call for Papers
Philipp Foehn and Davide Scaramuzza, from RPG, along with Varun
Mural and Sertac Karaman,
from MIT, organize the 2nd RSS Workshop on Perception and
Control for Fast and Agile
Super-Vehicles. We will have a great line of speakers from
academia and industry but we also
accept manuscripts.
Abstract deadline: June 14.
Notification of acceptance: June 21.
Workshop: July 12, 2020, virtual event.
Workshop webpage: https://mit-fast.github.io/WorkshopRSS20SuperVehicles/
Please email all submissions to
super-vehicles-rss20-submit@mit.edu
with RSS20 Super Vehicles in the subject line.
May 28, 2020
RPG organizes 3rd FPV Drone Racing VIO competition
The competition will be held jointly with the 6th edition of the
IROS 2020 Workshop on
"Perception, Learning, and Control for Autonomous Agile
Vehicles".
The participants will run their VIO algorithms on datasets
(including images, IMU
measurements and event data) recorded with a FPV drone racing
quadrotor flown by an expert
pilot with speeds up to and over 20m/s. More information at https://fpv.ifi.uzh.ch.
May 27, 2020
Our Master student Tim Taubner wins ETH Medal for Best Master
thesis!
Tim Taubner, who did his Master thesis Competitive Drone
Racing via
Pass-Block Games at both Stanford University and RPG
has received the
ETH Medal 2020 and the Willi Studer Prize for the best student
in the
ETH Master Robotics, Systems and Control in the period March
2019-2020.
May 25, 2020
AlphaPilot Paper at RSS 2020
Check out our performance at the 2019 AlphaPilot
Challenge now in
video.
Additionally, we present our
paper
at RSS 2020, describing our approach combining learning and
model-based techniques to rank
second in the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.
March 30, 2020
Code Release
Our new GPU-optmized FAST detector is available on github.
It implements a GPU-specific novel non-maximum suppression and
enhanced FAST detector,
achieving over 1000fps on a Jetson TX2.
Check out our paper Faster
than FAST.
March 20, 2020
RPG research aired on SRF and 3Sat TV!
This documentary
(German only) demonstrates our research on how autonomous drones
can be used for search and
rescue. (video starts at time 15:50)
March 18, 2020
On the coverpage of Science Robotics!
Our Science Robotics paper on "Dynamic obstacle avoidance for
quadrotors with event cameras"
conquers the coverpage of Science Robotics March issue! PDF,
Video.
March 8, 2020
Henri Rebecq finalist in the Georges Giralt PhD Award!
Henri Rebecq is finalist in the 2019's edition of the George Giralt
European PhD Thesis Award
out of 60 applications.
February 18, 2020
Open positions in Vision-based Control for Agile Flight
We have openings at both PhD and Postdoctoral levels in
Vision-based Control for Agile
Flight, such as autonomous drone racing.
More info here.
February 13, 2020
Code Release
We have just released the code of our RA-L and ICRA paper A General
Framework for Uncertainty Estimation in Deep
Learning.
Our framework can compute uncertainties for every network
architecture,
does not require changes in the optimization process,
and can be applied to already trained architectures.
Our framework's code is available at this page!
February 7, 2020
Release of Driving Event Camera Datasets
We are excited to release many driving datasets recorded in the
context
of our T-PAMI paper High Speed and High
Dynamic Range Video with
an Event Camera.
The datasets consist of a number of sequences that were recorded
with a
VGA (640x480) event camera (Samsung DVS Gen3) and a conventional
RGB
camera (Huawei P20 Pro) placed on the windshield of a car
driving
through Zurich.
The driving datasets are available at this page.
December 6, 2019
RPG ranks 2nd at Autonomous Drone Racing World Championship!
The team composed by Dario Brescianini, Philipp Foehn, Elia Kaufmann
and Mathias Gehrig
ranks 2nd in the AlphaPilot Autonomous Drone Racing World
Championship! Congratulations! (UZH
News, HeroX)
December 5, 2019
Davide Falanga successfully passed his PhD defense
Congratulations to Davide Falanga, who has successfully defended his
PhD dissertation titled
"Agile, Vision-Based Quadrotor Flight: from Active, Low-Latency
Perception to Adaptive
Morphology", on Dec. 2, 2019. We thank the reviewers: Prof.
Nathan Michael, Prof. Sami
Haddadin and Prof. Roland Siegwart!
December 1, 2019
SNSF Bridge and Venture Kick awarded
Kunal Shrivastava and Kevin Kleber receive 140k CHF from the SNSF
BRIDGE
and Venture Kick funds
for translating their
research into product! Congratulations!
November 21, 2019
Henri Rebecq successfully passed his PhD defense
Congratulations to Henri Rebecq, who has successfully defended his
PhD dissertation titled
"Event Cameras, from SLAM to High Speed Video", on Nov. 18,
2019. We thank the reviewers:
Prof. Andrew Davison, Prof. Tobi Delbruck and Prof. Bernt
Schiele!
October 28, 2019
Davide Scaramuzza keynote speaker at IROS 2019
We are proud to announce that on November 5, 2019, Davide Scaramuzza
will deliver a keynote
talk at IROS 2019 in Macau.
October 28, 2019
EKLT open-sourced
EKLT, our event-based feature tracking method is now available open
source. By leveraging the
complementarity of event cameras and standard cameras EKLT
achieves
unprecedented tracking accuracy with high temporal resolution.
https://github.com/uzh-rpg/rpg_eklt
October 15, 2019
IROS19 Workshop on Vision-Based Drones
Davide Scaramuzza and Giuseppe Loianno organize the 5th IROS
workshop on vision-based
drones! We have a great line of speakers from academia and
industry! Workshop
webpage.
October 12, 2019
Oculus Zurich expanding to 200 employees
Oculus Zurich (former Zurich Eye) soon expanding to 200
employees (currently 80)! Very proud
of you guys! Article
Handelszeitung.
September 4, 2019
RPG wins the NASA Tech Briefs "Create the Future" contest for the
category Aerospace and
Defense
Our foldable drone, the first quadrotor that can change its
shape and size in flight, is the
winner of the Aerospace and Defense category in the 2019 NASA
Tech Briefs "Create the
Future" contest. Check out the winners
list.
September 4, 2019
Davide Scaramuzza elected IEEE Senior Member
We are proud to announce that Prof. Davide Scaramuzza has been
elected to the grade of Senior
Member of the IEEE. Congratulations!
September 2, 2019
Guillermo Gallego starts as Professor at TU Berlin!
We congratulate our former postdoc Guillermo Gallego who starts today
to work as Associate
Professor
at TU Berlin.
Guillermo worked on event-based algorithms. His major contributions
are the release of the
first event-camera dataset, which has become a standard tool in
the computer vision
community, and a method, called "focus maximization", which
solves multiple computer vision
and machine learning problems with event cameras. He was also
the main author of the survey
paper on event-based
vision. Guillermo's
Personal homepage.
August 20, 2019
Davide Scaramuzza keynote speaker at FSR 2019!
Davide Scaramuzza will deliver a keynote speech at the international
conference on Field and
Service Robotics, in Tokyo, on September 31. More information here.
August 26, 2019
From Zurich-Eye to Oculus Quest
Learn how Zurich-Eye, co-founded by former RPG members Christian
Forster, Matia Pizzoli, and
Manuel Werlberger contributed to
the newly announced Oculus Insight and Oculus Quest (link)!
August 20, 2019
Interest point work open-sourced
Our recent work on interest points, which focuses on minimal
representations for relative
pose estimation, is now available open source.
SIPs achieves high matching score at low point counts, but uses
existing descriptors for
matching:
https://github.com/uzh-rpg/sips2_open
IMIPs instead provides a set of points that implicitly match between
views, without the need
for descriptors:
https://github.com/uzh-rpg/imips_open
August 13, 2019
RPG featured on BBC News
Our foldable drone was featured in a documentary by the BBC News
Arabic. Check-out the video
here.
July 29, 2019
RPG organizes the first FPV Drone Racing VIO competition
The
competition will be held jointly with the 5th edition of the
IROS
2019 Workshop on
"Challenges in Vision-based Drone Navigation", which will take
place on November 8, 2019, in
Macau.
The participants will run their VIO algorithms on datasets (including
images, IMU
measurements and event data) recorded with a FPV drone racing
quadrotor flown by an expert
pilot with speeds up to and over 20m/s. More information here.
July 29, 2019
Survey paper on Rescue Robotics on JFR
The Swiss National Centre of Research (NCCCR) Robotics published a
joint
paper on the current state and future
outlook of rescue robotics in the Journal of Field Robotics.
Paper: PDF.
July 29, 2019
RPG featured on NZZ
Our lab's work towards the Alphapilot autonomous drone racing
competition was featured on
Neuer Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ). Check out the article here
for more details (only in German).
July 9, 2019
Video
recordings and
Slides of the CVPR 2019 Workshop on Event-based
Vision and Smart Cameras are now
available!
On June 17, 2019, Davide Scaramuzza (RPG), Guillermo Gallego
(RPG), and Kostas Daniilidis
(UPenn)
organized the 2nd International Workshop on Event-based Vision
and Smart Cameras at CVPR,
Long Beach.
July 8, 2019
Our PhD student Manasi Muglikar wins the ETH Robotics Summer School
Challenge
Manasi Muglikar, PhD student in
our lab, won the ETH
Robotics Summer
School Robot Competition. Congratulations!
July 8, 2019
Davide Scaramuzza, Stanford University, and Microsoft organize Drone
Racing Competition at
NeurIPS 2019!
Game of Drones is a NeurIPS 2019 competition with the goal to push
the boundary of building
competitive autonomous systems through head-to-head drone races.
Check out the official
webpage for further details.
June 10, 2019
On June 17, 2019, Davide Scaramuzza (RPG), Guillermo Gallego
(RPG), and Kostas Daniilidis
(UPenn)
are organizing the 2nd International Workshop on Event-based
Vision and Smart Cameras at
CVPR in Long Beach.
Check out the schedule,
accepted papers and live demos for this full-day
workshop.
We will have top speakers from both academia and industry
(Samsung, Intel, Prophesee,
iniVation, Insightness, CelePixel).
June 10, 2019
RPG selected to participate in the AlphaPilot Autonomous Drone
Racing Competition
We are proud to announce that our lab is one of the nine teams
that were accepted into the
2019 AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge, where we will compete to
design an AI framework
capable of piloting racing drones through high-speed aerial
courses without any GPS, data
relay or human intervention. The competition has a $1 million
cash prize, sponsored by
Lockheed Martin. Check out the official
press release for further information.
June 5, 2019
Davide Scaramuzza talks about drone racing on IEEE Spectrum
Check out Prof.
Davide Scaramuzza's interview with IEEE Spectrum
about the Alphapilot competition,
why drone racing matters for robotic research, and our recently
released UZH FPV Drone
Racing Dataset.
May 24, 2019
Best Paper Award for Zichao Zhang!
Zichao Zhang, PhD student in our lab, received the Best Paper Award
at the ICRA 2019 Workshop
on SLAM
Benchmarking in Montreal on May 24 with his paper
titled "Rethinking Trajectory
Evaluation for SLAM: a Probabilistic, Continuous-Time Approach"!
Congratulations!
May 22, 2019
UltimateSLAM receives the IEEE RAL'18 Best Paper Award Honourable
Mention
Our paper UltimateSLAM received the IEEE Robotics and Automation
Letters 2018 Best Paper
Award Honourable Mention during the award session at the ICRA
2019 conference in Montreal.
It ranked in the top 3 out of 520 papers published by RAL in
2018. Read the paper here
and watch the video here for more
details.
May 21, 2019
RPG releases the UZH-FPV Drone Racing Dataset
We are happy to announce the release of the UZH-FVP Drone Racing
Dataset. It contains over
30 sequences of data from event cameras, standard cameras, IMU,
and ground truth recorded by
an FPV drone flown up to over 20m/s by professional drone pilots
in real-world scenarios!
Check out the official web
page for more
details.
May 13, 2019
RPG research on dynamic obstacle avoidance with event cameras
featured on IEEE Spectrum
Our latest work on quadrotor flight with event cameras was featured
on IEEE
Spectrum. For more details, read the paper here
and watch the video here.
May 13, 2019
PULP-DroNet: The First Fully Autonomous Nano-Size UAV
In collaboration with researchers at the digital Circuits and Systems
lab at ETH,
we have deviced a nano-drone (few centimeters in diameter) which
can navigate in indoor
environments with only onboard sensing and computing.
Video, Paper, Code.
May 10, 2019
New Postdoc and Drone Engineer
We welcome Dr. Dimche Kostadinov as new Postdoc and Thomas
Längle as new Drone Engineer
in our lab!
May 8, 2019
Our PhD student Daniel Gehrig wins ETH Medal for Best Master thesis!
Daniel Gehrig, former Master student and current PhD student in our
lab, won the ETH Medal
for his outstanding Master thesis! Congratulations!
Check out his ECCV'18 paper here, which is based
on his
Master thesis.
May 8, 2019
"UltimateSLAM" nominated IEEE RAL Best Paper Award finalist (in the
top 3 out of 520
papers!)
Our paper "Ultimate SLAM? Combining Events, Images, and IMU for
Robust Visual SLAM in HDR and
High Speed Scenarios" was nominated finalist
for the 2018 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper
Award. Our paper is in the top
3 out of 520 papers published by RAL in 2018.
Read the paper here
and watch
the video here.
May 7, 2019
Rapid Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance with Event Camera
Our paper "How Fast is Too Fast? The Role of Perception Latency in
High-Speed Sense and
Avoid" has been accepted for publication in the Robotics and
Automation Letters (RA-L) 2019.
We analyze the role of perception latency, sensing range and
actuation limitatations on the
maximum speed a robot can reach to safely navigate in an unknown
environment. Our analysis
is supported by experimental evaluation, where a quadrotor
equipped with an event camera is
able to avoid an obstacle moving towards it at 10 m/s. Read the
paper here
and watch the video here.
April 23, 2019
Survey paper on Event-based Vision!
Guillermo Gallego, Davide Scaramuzza and 10 other international
experts wrote a joint,
25-page-long survey paper on event-based cameras, from their
working principle to algorithms
and applications.
Read the paper here.
April 09, 2019
RPG wins the Drone Hero Award 2019
Our work on the foldable drone, the first quadrotor able to
change morphology in flight to
adapt its shape and size to different tasks, won the Drone
Hero Award
Contest 2019 for the category Innovative Drone. Read
the paper here
and watch the video here.
March 26, 2019
RPG Featured on The New York Times
Our research on autonomous drone racing was featured on The New
York Times:
"A drone from the University of Zurich is an engineering and
technical marvel...".
Check
out the article!
March 15, 2019
CVPR 2019 Workshop on Event-based Vision and Smart Cameras - Call
for Papers and Demos!
Call for papers and demos! On June 17, 2019, Davide Scaramuzza
(RPG), Guillermo Gallego
(RPG), and Kostas Daniilidis (UPenn) will organize the 2nd
Workshop on Event-based Vision
and Smart Cameras at CVPR in Long Beach.
Check out our speakers lineup.
March 11, 2019
RPG news reach over 200 million readers in 2018!
Our lab received an impressive media coverage during 2018, with more
than 200 million
readers across the world.
January 18, 2019
CVPR 2019 Workshop on Event-based Vision
On June 16 and 17, 2019, Davide Scaramuzza (RPG), Guillermo
Gallego (RPG) and Kostas
Daniilidis (UPenn) will organize a workshop at CVPR in Long
Beach about Event-based Vision.
Check out the speakers lineup on the workshop
website.
December 18, 2018
Code Release - EMVS: Event-based Multi-View Stereo
We release the code for Event-based Multi-View Stereo (EMVS):
3D reconstruction with an event
camera.
The code provided
is implemented in C++
and produces accurate, semi-dense depth
maps without requiring any explicit data association or
intensity estimation.
The code runs in real-time on a CPU.
Paper,
YouTube,
Code on
Github.
December 6, 2018
Code Release - PAMPC: Perception-Aware Model Predictive Control for
Quadrotors
We are excited to announce that our RPG control framework gets a new
addition: our
Perception-Aware Model Predictive Control (PAMPC) is
opensource and the source code is available here.
PAMPC
combines control and planning
in one solution and allows to not only achieve an action
objective but also compromise it
with a perception objective. Further details are available in our
paper presented at IROS 2018. Video.
November 15, 2018
Open positions in Robotics, Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning
and Event-Based vision
We have several openings at both PhD and Postdoctoral levels in
Robotics, Machine learning,
Reinforcement Learning, Control, Computer Vision, Event Cameras,
and beyond. Info and how to
apply here.
November 3, 2018
We released ESIM: our open source event camera simulator
We release ESIM, our new event
camera
simulator. ESIM can simulate events accurately and efficiently,
as
well as other sensors such as a conventional camera (including
motion blur!),
and an inertial measurement unit (IMU).
ESIM readily provides ground truth depth and optic flow maps.
Multiple
rendering engines are available,
including a photorealistic rendering engine based on Unreal
Engine, and a
fast 3D engine based on OpenGL that can simulate
events in real-time.
Paper,
YouTube,
Project Page,
Code on
Github.
October 16, 2018
We released the paper with which we won IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone
Race
Upon
large requests, we decided to
release on Arxiv the PDF of the paper describing the approach
with which we won the IROS
2018 Autonomous Drone Race. Our approach fuses deep learning and
optimal control to achieve
the ultimate flight performance. For these reasons we titled the
paper: Beauty and the
Beast. Who is the Beauty and who is the Beast? ;-) Paper,
YouTube.
October 3, 2018
RPG won the IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone Race
We are
proud to announce that our team won the IROS Autonomous Drone
Race Competition, passing all
8 gates in just 30 seconds! In order to succeed, we combined
deep networks, local VIO,
Kalman filtering, and optimal control. Watch our performance here.
September 26, 2018
Zuckerberg announced Zurich-Eye built Oculus Quest!
Mark
Zuckerberg just announced the new Oculus VR headset, called
Oculus Quest. This is what our
former lab startup, Zurich Eye, now Oculus Zurich has been
working on for the past two
years. Watch the video.
September 21, 2018
IROS 2018 Workshop: "Vision-based Drones: What's Next?"
On
October 5, 2018, Giuseppe Loianno (New York University), Davide
Scaramuzza (RPG), and Vijay
Kumar (UPenn) will organize a workshop at IROS in Madrid about
"Vision-based Drones: What's
Next?". Check out the speakers lineup on the workshop
website.
September 21, 2018
RPG will take part in the IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone Race
Our lab
will partecipate in the IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone Race in
Madrid. Further details are
available here.
September 2, 2018
RPG live demo at Langen Nacht der Zurcher Museen
We
performed a live quadrotor demo at the Zurich Kunsthalle during
the Langen Nacht der
Zurcher Museen, as part of the 100 Ways of
Thinking show, in front of more
than 200 people. Check out the media coverage here.
August 30, 2018
RPG featured on NZZ
Our research was feature on Neue Zucher Zeitung. Check out the
article here.
August 28, 2018
Huge media coverage for search and rescue demonstration
Our lab received great Swiss media attention (NZZ, SwissInfo, SRF)
for our live flight
demonstration of a quadrotor entering a collapsed building to
simulate a search and rescue
operation. Check out the video here.
August 7, 2018
RPG demo featured on the Swiss Federal Office for Deference
Procurement website
Our live demo of a quadrotor entering a collapsed building through a
narrow gap was featured
on the website of the Swiss Federal Office for Deference
Procurement (armasuisse). More
details are available here.
July 5, 2018
Facebook continues keeps expanding in Zurich
Facebook-Oculus Zurich, former Zurich-Eye, keeps expanding in Zurich:
35 employees and
growing at a rate of 3 new people per month. RPG is very proud
of them! More info here.
July 10, 2018
RPG research featured on NewScientist
Our research on autonomous drone racing was featured on NewScientist.
Check out the article
here.
June 13, 2018
Paper accepted in RA-L 2018!
Our paper about safe quadrotor navigation computing forward reachable
sets was accepted for
publication in the Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 2018.
Check out the PDF.
June 11, 2018
Paper accepted at RSS 2018!
Our paper about drone racing was accepted to RSS 2018 in Pittsburgh!
Check out the long
version, short
version and the video!
June 10, 2018
Paper accepted at IEEE TRO
Our paper on Continuous-Time Visual-Inertial Odometry for Event
Cameras has been accepted for
publication at Transactions of Robotics.
Check out the
paper.
June 1, 2018
New Postdoc
We welcome Dr. Dario Brescianini as new Postdoc in our lab!
May 28, 2018
RPG receives 2017 IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO) best paper
award
Our paper on IMU pre-integration received the 2017 IEEE
Transactions on Robotics (TRO) best
paper award at ICRA 2018 in Brisbane, Australia. Check out the
paper here. Press
coverage!
May 14, 2018
IEEE TRO Best Paper Award
We are proud to announce that our paper on IMU pre-integration will
receive the 2017 IEEE
Transactions on Robotics (TRO) best paper award. On this
occasion, IEEE made the article
open access for the next ten years!
Press
coverage
C. Forster, L. Carlone, F. Dellaert,
D. Scaramuzza
On-Manifold Preintegration for
Real-Time Visual-Inertial Odometry
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol
33, no. 1, pp. 1-21, Feb. 2017.
PDF DOI
YouTube
May 10, 2018
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship
Henri Rebecq, a PhD student in our lab, won a Qualcomm
Innovation Fellowship with his proposal "Learning
Representations for Low-Latency
Perception with Frame and Event-based Cameras"!
April 26, 2018
Release of NetVLAD in Python/Tensorflow
We are happy to announce a Python/Tensorflow port of the FULL NetVLAD
network, approved by
the original authors and available here
(see also
our software/datasets
page). The repository contains
code which allows plug-and-play python deployment of the best
off-the-shelf model made
available by the authors. We have thoroughly tested that the
ported model produces a similar
output to the original Matlab implementation, as well as
excellent place recognition
performance on KITTI 00.
April 24, 2018
Release of Data-Efficient Decentralized Visual SLAM
We provide the
code accompanying our
recent Decentralized Visual SLAM paper.
The code contains a C++/Matlab simulation containing all
building blocks for a
state-of-the-art decentralized visual SLAM system.
Check out
the paper,
the Video
Pitch,
the
presentation and
the
code.
April 23, 2018
Release of the Fast Event-based Corner Detector
We provide the code of our FAST
event-based corner detector.
Our implementation is capable of processing millions of events
per second on a single core
(less than a micro-second per event) and reduces the event rate
by a factor of 10 to 20.
Check out our Paper, video, and code.
April 23, 2018
Release of the RPG Quadrotor Control Framework
We provide a complete framework for flying quadrotors based on
control algorithms developed
by the Robotics and Perception Group. We also provide an
interface to the RotorS Gazebo
plugins to use our algorithms in simulation. Check out our software
page and the Github
repository for more
details.
March 14, 2018
Henri Rebecq finalist at the Qualcomm Innovation Award Fellowship
Henri Rebecq, PhD student in our lab, was finalist
at the Qualcomm Innovation Award Fellowship.
March 14, 2018
Christian Forster finalist in the Georges Giralt PhD Award!
Christian Forster, first PhD student to graduate from RPG, ranked
second in the 2017's
edition of the George Giralt European PhD Thesis Award out of 41
applications.
March 14, 2018
Huge media coverage for DroNet
Our recent work on how to teach a drone to fly autonomously and
safely in the streets of a
city (PDF)
received a huge
media coverage. Check out our media
page.
March 02, 2018
RPG Impresses Swiss Government Representatives
RPG impresses Swiss minister Schneider-Ammann and other federal and
cantonal representatives
at the inauguration of the Innovation Park Switzerland. Check
out here.
January 23, 2018
Davide Scaramuzza gives an invited talk at Microsoft Research
Seattle
Check out the video here.
January 23, 2018
DroNet: Learning to Fly by Driving
We have deviced a Deep Neural Network, called DroNet, that teaches a
drone how to fly
autonomously and safely in the streets of a city, among other
vehicles, by imitating the
behavior or cars and bicycles!
Video, Paper,
Datasets.
January 1, 2018
New Postdoc
We welcome Dr. Peng Lu as new Postdoc in our lab!
December 14, 2017
Paper accepted in RA-L
Our work on differential flatness of quadrotor dynamics subject to
rotor drag has been
accepted for publication in the Robotics and Automation Letters.
Read the paper here
and watch the video here.
December 14, 2017
RPG in the NCCR integrative demo of aerial and terrestrial robots
Our group took part to the NCCR Robotics integrative demo of aerial
and terrestrial robots
for rescue missions. Check out the video here.
December 4, 2017
New PhD Student
We welcome Mathias Gehrig as new PhD student in our lab!
November 24, 2017
RPG celebrates 5-year anniversary!
In this clip, we summarize our main achievements, projects, awards,
exhibitions, and upcoming
videos!
Watch our YouTube
video!
November 7, 2017
Paper accepted in IJCV!
Our work on 3D reconstruction with an event camera in real-time has
been accepted for
publication in the International Journal of Computer Vision.
Read the paper here.
October 31, 2017
Paper accepted in T-PAMI !
Our work on 6-DOF ego-motion estimation with an event camera has been
accepted for
publication in IEEE Trans. Patter Analysis and Machine
Intelligence.
Check out the paper here.
October 11, 2017
Our paper on efficient decentralized visual place recognition was
accepted to MRS 2017!
Our recent work on decentralized visual place recognition from
full-image descriptors was
accepted to MRS 2017, the
first international symposium on
multi-robot and multi-agent systems!
Check out the paper here.
October 9, 2017
RPG ranks 2nd at the IROS 2017 Autonomous Drone Race
We ranked 2nd at the IROS 2017 Autonomous Drone Race in Vancouver.
Check out the video of our
performance here
and the official
website of the competition here.
October 9, 2017
RPG nominated Best Paper Award on Safety Security and Rescue
Robotics Finalist at IROS 2017
Our paper "Rapid Exploration with Multi-Rotors: A Frontier Selection
Method for High Speed
Flight" was nominated finalist for the Best Paper Award on
Safety Security and Rescue
Robotics at IROS 2017 in Vancouver. Check out the paper here.
October 6, 2017
Davide Scaramuzza talks about Swiss vision startups in the Swiss ICT
journal
Check out the article here.
October 5, 2017
RPG research on DVS featured on IEEE Spectrum
Our latest work on quadrotor flight with event cameras was featured
on IEEE
Spectrum. For more details, check
our research page.
September 22, 2017
Davide Scaramuzza gives invited talk at GeorgiaTech Robotics Seminar
Series
Davide Scaramuzza talks about autonomous, agile, vision-controlled
drones and event cameras
at the GeorgiaTech robotics seminar series: check out the video
here.
September 20, 2016
Press release: RPG drones use event cameras to fly faster and even
in the dark!
This is the first ever autonomous flight with an event camera, which
demonstrates agile
maneuvers and flying in low-light environments. Possible
applications could include
supporting rescue teams with search missions at dusk or dawn.
Check out the press
release, our video and our paper.
August 30, 2017
Davide Scaramuzza appointed Tenured Associate Professor
Davide Scaramuzza was appointed Tenured Associate Professor with
double affiliation with the
Insitute of Neuroinformatics of the University of Zurich and ETH
Zurich. Check out the news
here.
August 29, 2017
Open position as Drone Research Engineer
We have a new opening in our team for a Drone Research Engineer. See
our open
positions for more details.
August 29, 2017
RPG affiliated with the Institute of Neuroinformatics
We are happy to announce that our lab is now affiliated with the Institute of
Neuroinformatics (INI), a joint
institute belonging to the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich.
August 11, 2017
RPG receives Best Student Paper Award Finalist prize at RSS
Philipp Foehn, PhD student in our lab, and Naveen Kuppuswamy, former
visiting researcher,
received the Best Student Paper Award Finalist prize at RSS 2017
in Boston for our work on
trajectory optimization for agile quadrotor maneuvers with
cable-suspended payloads. Check
out the paper here and the
video here.
July 14, 2017
Binaries for SVO 2.0 released
We are happy to release the binaries of our Semi-Direct Visual
Odometry, SVO 2.0.
It can run up to 400 frames per second on a modern laptop and
execute in real-time on a
smartphone processor.
The binaries can be found here.
July 12, 2017
List of Event-based Vision Resources available
We are happy to start The
List of Event-based Vision Resources,
which contains links to event camera devices as well as papers,
videos, code, etc.
describing the algorithms and systems developed using this
exciting technology.
We hope the list will help newcomers to the field to get started
with this technology by
directing them to the appropriate references.
Help us improve the list by adding more entries! (Please follow
the "Contributing"
guidelines).
June 21, 2017
Code for image reconstruction from an event camera released
We are happy to announce the release of the code for recovering the
brigthness map that
caused the events to be triggered.
The code can be found here.
June 15, 2017
Slides and Videos of the ICRA17 International Workshop on
Event-based Vision are out!
The slides and videos of the talks of the International Workshop on
Event-based Vision are
now available at the workshop
website
and the RPG
Workshops
Youtube channel.
June 15, 2017
Code for Event Lifetime released
We are happy to announce the release of the code for event lifetime.
The lifetime of an event
is the time that it takes for the moving brightness gradient
causing the event to travel a
distance of 1 pixel. More details in the following ICRA
publication. The code can
be found here.
May 12, 2017
Davide Scaramuzza talks at Maker Festival of his home town!
Prof. Davide Scaramuzza gave a talk at the Maker Festival in Terni
about the role of computer
vision in autonomous cars and drones. Check the news here
(Italian).
May 5, 2017
RPG wins the 2017 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering!
The Robotics and Perception Group wins the 2017 Misha Mahowald Prize,
which recognizes
outstanding achievement in the field of neuromorphic
engineering. Check out the press
release here.
Watch out our summary video on Event-based Vision
for Autonomous High-Speed Robotics.
April 3, 2017
Our paper on Volumetric Information Gain Metrics for Active 3D
Reconstruction has been
published by Autonomous Robots!
Our recent work comparing volumetric information gain metrics for
object reconstruction is
part of the Autonomous Robots special issue on Active Vision.
Check out the paper here.
April 20, 2017
Our PhD student Antonio Loquercio wins ETH Medal for Best Master
thesis!
Antonio Loquercio, PhD student in our lab, won the ETH Medal for his
outstanding Master
thesis! Congratulations!
April 4, 2017
The Zurich Urban Micro Aerial Vehicle Dataset released!
We are happy to announce the release of the first public, large-scale
dataset recorded with a
drone in an urban environment at low altitudes (5-15m).
The 2 km dataset consists of time synchronized aerial
high-resolution images, GPS and IMU
sensor data, ground-level street view images, and ground truth
data.
The dataset is ideal to evaluate and benchmark appearance-based
localization, monocular
visual
odometry, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and
online 3D reconstruction
algorithms for MAVs in urban
environments. Go to the dataset
webpage.
April 3, 2017
Our paper on Collaborative Transport with Multiple MAVs appeared on
Discovery Channel
Our paper on Collaborative Transport with Multiple MAVs appeared on
Discovery Channel Canada.
Check out the paper here.
March 31, 2017
New Postdoc and PhD Student
We welcome Dr. Suseong Kim, as new Postdoc, and Philipp Foehn, as new
PhD student, in our
lab!
March 24, 2017
Fotokite won EUrobotics transfer award
Fotokite, the Swiss startup
developing tethered drones,
which was incubated within RPG in 2014 through the NCCR Spin
Fund, won the 2017 EUrobotics
Tech Transfer Award! Congratulations! We are very proud of you!
February 24, 2017
Davide Scaramuzza's CMU seminar on IEEE Spectrum
Davide Scaramuzza's seminar on visual-inertial state estimation,
active vision, and
event-based vision at CMU was featured on
IEEE Spectrum. Watch the video on YouTube.
February 17, 2017
Davide Scaramuzza gives invited talk at CMU Robotics Seminar Series
Davide Scaramuzza talks about visual-inertial state estimation,
active vision, and
event-based vision at CMU Robotics Institute Seminar Series: YouTube,
Abstract.
February 16, 2017
RPG research among the 3 most popular news of the University of
Zurich of 2016
Our research on autonomous drones was featured on the University of
Zurich Journal, ranking
3rd on the list of the most popular news release of 2016.
Check out the UZH Journal on Page 5.
February 15, 2017
Magic Leap buys Dacuda's 3D Division
Dacuda's 3D
Division, a
long-standing collaborator of RPG, got acquired by Magic
Leap, the unicorn of Augmented Reality
(news
here).
One amazing result of our collaboration was a software that runs
on a smartphone and
delivers at the same time an immersive virtual-reality
experience like high-end VR headsets.
This software was the result of a great project with RPG, which
was demoed at CES 2017 (LINK).
Congratulations guys!.
Febraury 6, 2017
Open Postdoc positions in Deep Learning and Computer Vision for
Robotics
For info and applications, please see here.
February 1, 2017
New PhD Student
Welcome to Antonio Loquercio as a new PhD student in our lab!
January 9, 2017
Our paper on efficient decentralized visual place recognition was
accepted to RA-L!
Our recent work on decentralized visual place recognition using a
distributed inverted index
was accepted to RA-L!
Check out the paper here.
December 20, 2016
Our paper EVO (Event-based, 6-DOF Parallel Tracking and Mapping in
Real-Time) was accepted
to RA-L!
Our recent work on real-time parallel tracking and mapping with an
event camera was accepted
to RA-L!
Check out the video here,
and the paper here.
December 20, 2016
Our paper on Accurate Angular Velocity Estimation with an Event
Camera was accepted to RA-L!
Our recent work on motion estimation with an event camera by contrast
maximization was
accepted to RA-L!
Check out the video here,
and the paper here.
December 14, 2016
Our research on aggressive flight through narrow gaps with active
monocular vision is on
MIT Technology Review
Our recent work on quadrotor flight through narrow gaps using only
onboard sensing and
computing is featured on MIT Technology Review. Click here
to read the article.
December 3, 2016
Our paper on Agile Quadrotor Flight through Narrow Gaps available on
Arxiv
Our recent work "Aggressive Quadrotor Flight through Narrow Gaps witn
Onboard Sensing and
Computing" is available on Arxiv for download. [Link]
November 19, 2016
RPG featured in the World Robotics report of the International
Federation of Robotics
Our lab was featured in the 2016 World Robotics report of the
International Federation of
Robotics as outstanding profile of research lab in service
robotics. Check out the report here.
November 14, 2016
Open PhD and Postdoc positions in Deep Learning, Control, and Robot
Vision
We have several open PhD student and Postdoc positions in Deep
Learning, Control, and Robot
Vision for Agile, Vision-based Quadrotor Flight. For more info
and applications, please see
here.
November 11, 2016
Facebook-Oculus VR Zurich (aka Zurich-Eye) is in the main Swiss
news!
Zurich-Eye, the Wyss-Zurich
project co-founded in Sep. 2015 by
former RPG members Christian Forster (author of SVO),
Matia Pizzoli (author of REMODE),
and Manuel Werlberger,
gets featured in the Swiss
news.
October 27, 2016
Event-Camera Dataset and Simulator released!
We are happy to announce the release of the first public datasets
recorded with an event
camera (DAVIS) for pose estimation, visual odometry, and SLAM
applications! The data also
include intensity images, inertial measurements, ground truth
from a motion-capture system,
synthetic data, as well as an event camera simulator!
We believe that event cameras will allow future robots to move
faster and more agilely. Find
out more on the dataset website!
October 24, 2016
Fritz-Kutter Award for Industry Related Thesis in Computer Science
Our former student and current Research Assistant Timo
Horstschäfer won the Fritz
Kutter Award
for Industry Related Thesis in Computer Science with his Master
Thesis "Parallel Tracking,
Depth Estimation, and Image Reconstruction with an Event
Camera". This is the second time in
two years that an RPG master student wins this prestigious
award! Congratulations!
October 14, 2016
IROS 16 Best Application Paper Award Finalist
Our paper Low-Latency
Visual Odometry
using Event-based Feature Tracks was nominated as
Finalist for the Best Application
Paper Award at IROS 2016. Also, it was selected as highlight
oral talk, with an acceptance
rate of 0.4%. Congratulations to Beat Kueng, Elias Mueggler and
Guillermo Gallego!
October 14, 2016
IROS'16 workshop organized by Davide Scaramuzza attracts 200 people
worldwide!
Our third international workshop on Vision-based
High Speed
Autonomous Navigation of UAVs, co-organized by
Giuseppe Loianno (UPenn), Davide
Scaramuzza (RPG), and Vijay Kumar (UPenn) featured an impressive
line of renowned speakers,
live demos, industries, and attracted more than 200 people
worldwide!
October 3, 2016
New Visiting PhD Student
We welcome Rubén Gómez Ojeda from University of
Málaga as new visiting
PhD student in our lab!
September 27, 2016
Agile Flight through Narrow Gaps!
Check out our latest work on agile quadrotor flight through
narrow gaps with onboard sensing
and computing: LINK
September 22, 2016
Best BMVC'16 Industry Paper Award!
Our paper EMVS: Event-based
Multi-View Stereo, receives
BMVC'16 Best Industry Paper Award! Congratulations to Henri
Rebecq and Guillermo Gallego!
September 14, 2016
Zurich-Eye now part of Facebook-Oculus VR Zurich!
Zurich-Eye, the Wyss-Zurich
project co-founded in Sep. 2015 by
former RPG members Christian Forster (author of SVO),
Matia Pizzoli (author of REMODE),
and Manuel Werlberger,
is now part of Oculus VR Zurich. RPG is very proud of them! This
highlights the importance
and impact of the great work they have done!
September 12, 2016
New paper accepted at BMVC16!
Our paper "EMVS: Event-based Multi-View Stereo" about monocular
3D reconstruction using an
event camera has been accepted for oral presentation at BMVC'16!
Check out our publication list.
September 1, 2016
New drone engineer!
Welcome to Alessandro Simovic as a new drone engineer in our lab!
September 1, 2016
New visiting Assistant Professor
Welcome to Stefano
Ghidoni from the
University of Padua as a visiting assistant professor in our
lab!
August 19, 2016
Trained in 60 seconds...
RPG and IDSIA have collaborated
on a new paper, which
will be presented at ISER 2016. We show that we can train a
terrain classifier for search
and rescue scenarios while our quadrotor is in flight, in
only one minute! Results
can be seen in this YouTube video,
and details
can be found in our publication
list.
July 25, 2016
RPG members win reading group competition at ICVSS
Zichao Zhang and Titus Cieslewski were in the reading group that
won the reading group
competition at the International
Computer
Vision Summer School. One of the main ingredients
for this success was an
experimental literature visualization tool developed at the RPG
group retreat.
July 20, 2016
Open position as Drone Research Engineer
We have an open position in our team for a Drone Research Engineer.
Check out our open positions.
July 14, 2016
New papers accepted for EBCCSP'16 and IROS'16
Check out our publication list.
May 25, 2016
Software Release: Information Gain Based Active Reconstruction
Framework
The software package corresponding to the paper An Information
Gain Formulation for Active
Volumetric 3D Reconstruction is now available from
our Github
page. This is
a general, open-source, framework for volumetric reconstruction
that is object, sensor, and
robot-agnostic. Some results can be see in this YouTube video.
May 23, 2016
New visiting researcher from Toyota Research Institute Boston
Welcome to Dr. Naveen Kuppuswamy, our new visiting researcher from
Toyota Research Institute
Boston (MA)!
March 7, 2016
Four new papers accepted for RA-L/ICRA'16!
Check out our publication list.
February 12, 2016
RPG receives huge media coverage worldwide!
We received huge media coverage for our
research on autonomous drone
navigation in the forests using Deep Neural Network; among
these, Discovery Channel Canada
and NBC
News.
February 11, 2016
RPG on IEEE Spectrum and Robohub
Our recent work on autonomous navigation in the forests using Deep
Neural Networks makes it
to IEEE
Spectrum and Robohub.
February 10, 2016
RPG on SRF Tagesschau
Our recent work on autonomous navigation in the forests using Deep
Neural Networks makes it
to the Swiss National TV News channel: SRF
Tagesschau.
February 10, 2016
Our drones use DNNs to learn to recognize and follow forest trails
in search for missing
people
This research appeared in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letter,
will be presented at the
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA'16) and is nominated for the
best AAAI video Award. Journal
paper. More
info. YouTube
video.
January 15, 2016
Davide Scaramuzza Associate Faculty of the Wyss Zurich
Davide Scaramuzza was appointed Associate
Faculty at Wyss
Zurich, the new translational center of UZH and ETH
Zurich dedicated to regenerative
and robotics technologies.
January 14, 2016
One of our students receives a prize from Homegate at HackZurich!
Titus Cieslewski, a PhD student in our lab, has received a prize from
Homegate during the HackZurich
hackathon, for the project Wonsch. He and his team
were
among the top 3 of
the 20
teams that participated in the Homegate challenge during the
hackathon.
January 1, 2016
New PhD student
Welcome to Titus Cieslewski as a new PhD student in our lab!
January 1, 2016
Davide Scaramuzza from Magic to Robotics!
NCCR Robotics interviews
Davide Scaramuzza about
how his academic path, from working as a magician in theaters
and public squares to pay his
undergraduate studies to becoming a robotics professor (LINK).
October 31, 2015
Interview with Davide Scaramuzza on Robohub
An interview with Davide Scaramuzza was published on Robots
Podcast and Robohub.
Check out our media page!
October 2, 2015
IROS'15 workshop organized by Davide Scaramuzza attracts 200 people
worldwide!
Our second international workshop on Vision-based
Control and
Navigation of Small, Lightweight UAVs, co-organized
by Giuseppe Loianno (UPenn),
Davide Scaramuzza (RPG), and Vijay Kumar (UPenn) featured an
impressive line of renowned
speakers, live demos, industries, and attracted more than 200
people worldwide!
September 15, 2015
New research assistant
Welcome to Michael Gassner as a new research assistant in our lab!
September 5 and 6, 2015
RPG at Scientifica 2015
The Robotics and Perception Group showed their research at Scientifica,
the science fair of
ETH and University of Zurich.
25.000 visitors attended the event.
Have a look at the gallery!
September 1, 2015
RPG members create spinoff Zurich-Eye
Christian Forster (author of SVO),
Matia Pizzoli (author of REMODE),
and Manuel Werlberger create Zurich-Eye, an spinoff
project
of Wyss-Zurich
dedicated to the
commercialization of visual-inertial navigation solutions.
July 13, 2015
RSS'15 Best Paper Award Finalist
Christian Forster's RSS'15 paper is Best Paper Award Finalist at
RSS'15!
June 29, 2015
Two new papers accepted for RSS'15, one for ECMR'15!
Check out our publication list.
June 15, 2015
New PhD student
Welcome to Henri Rebecq as a new PhD student in our lab!
April 14, 2015
RPG research featured on IEEE Spectrum
Our latest work on failure recovery from agressive flight IEEE
Spectrum.
For more details, see the ICRA'15 paper and
the
accompanying video.
April 14, 2015
New PhD student
Welcome to Davide Falanga as a new PhD student in our lab!
March 30, 2015
Three new papers accepted for ICRA'15!
Check out our publication list.
March 20, 2015
RPG at CeBIT
RPG showcased its autonomous quadrotors and live 3D reconstruction at
this year's CeBIT, the
world's largest computer expo!
See some pictures in our gallery.
February 1, 2015
RPG celebrates 3-year anniversary!
In this clip, we summarize our main achievements, projects, awards,
exhibitions, and upcoming
videos!
Watch our YouTube
video!
November 21, 2014
Davide Scaramuzza wins ERC Starting Grant (1.5 million EUR)
Davide Scaramuzza wins ERC Starting Grant, through the Swiss National
Science Foundation.
October 29, 2014
Best Paper Award Finalists
Our SSRR'14 paper on
"Aerial-guided Navigation of a
Ground Robot among Movable Obstacles" was selected as Finalist
for the Best Paper Award.
Our ICRA'14 paper "REMODE:
Probabilistic, Monocular
Dense Reconstruction in Real Time" was nominated as Finalist for
the NCCR Best PostDoc Paper
Award.
October 7, 2014
RPG research featured on IEEE Spectrum
Our latest work on event-based vision was featured on IEEE
Spectrum.
For more details, see the IROS'14 paper and
the
accompanying video.
October 1, 2014
New Postdoc and visiting students
We welcome Dr. Manuel Werlberger as new Postdoc in our lab! We are
also happy to host Junije
Zhang and Zichao Zhang as visiting PhD students.
September 9, 2014
New paper accepted for SSRR'14!
Check out our publication list.
August 1, 2014
New Postdocs and visiting students
We welcome Dr. Guillermo Gallego and Dr. Jeff Delmerico as new
Postdocs in our lab! We are
also happy to host Antonio Toma, Gabriele Costante, Nathaly
Gasparin, Ra'Eesah Mangera,
Kumar Shaurya Shankar and Xin Yu as visiting students this year.
June 4, 2014
RPG wins KUKA Innovation Award!
The Robotics and Perception Group wins the KUKA Innovation Award
(20.000 EUR) with its
demonstration of collaboration of flying and ground robots for
search-and-rescue missions.
Watch a
video of the demo at AUTOMATICA.
June 2, 2014
Software Release: SVO - Semi-Direct Visual Odometry
The software corresponding to the paper SVO: Fast Semi-direct
Monocular Visual
Odometry can now be downloaded from our Github
page. The source code is
released under a GPLv3 licence. A professional edition license
for closed-source projects is
also available.
May 30, 2014
RPG research featured on MIT News
Our latest work on event-based vision was featured in the MIT
News.
For more details, see the ICRA'14 paper.
May 17, 2014
Two new papers accepted for RSS'14 and IROS'14!
Check out our publication list.
February 18, 2014
Davide Scaramuzza wins Google Faculty Research Award!
Many thanks to Google!
January 14, 2014
Eight new papers accepted for ICRA'14!
Check out our publication list.
December 2, 2013
Amazon Prime Air visits RPG
Daniel Buchmüller, co-founder and software engineer at Amazon
Prime Air, visited us.
November 26, 2013
KUKA Best Student Project Award 2013!
Benjamin Keiser won the KUKA
Best Student Project Award 2013 with his Master
thesis Torque Control of a KUKA
youBot Arm that he did with the Robotics and
Perception Group. A demonstration of
the capabilities of his controller is shown in this video.
November 20, 2013
RPG featured on arte X:enius
The Robotics and Perception Group was featured in a documentary on
the German-French TV
channel ARTE. Check both the German
and French
version!
November 19, 2013
Henri Seydoux, CEO of Parrot, visits RPG
Henri Seydoux, CEO and founder of Parrot, the company making the
popular toy quadrocopter
AR.Drone, visited us.
November 6, 2013
Open position in Embedded Computer Vision
Open position at the Robotics and Perception Group. Check here.
August 31, 2013
RPG was featured in a report about Scientifica 2013 on Radio SRF 1
The report can be found here.
August 1, 2013
New Postdoc
We welcome Sergei
Lupashin as a
new Postdoc in our lab!
July 31, 2013
Five new papers accepted for IROS'13 and ECMR'13!
Check out our publication list.
June 1, 2013
New Postdoc
We welcome Reza
Sabzevari as a new Postdoc in our lab!
May 4, 2013
Join RPG at ICRA'13
RPG will give two talks at ICRA'13: one by
Christian
Forster (ThDInt.14)
and one by Davide Scaramuzza (link)
April 29, 2013
A Documentary about RPG in the Swiss TV
A documentary by the Swiss TV about our autonomous helicopters for
search and rescue(link
to original article)
April 20, 2013
RPG participates at the Swiss Robotics Festival
The Swiss Robotics Festival is the largest Swiss Robotics exhibition,
which this year
attracted more than 20,000 participants. What some impressions
from our demonstrations! (link)
April 1, 2013
New PhD student
Welcome to Flavio Fontana as a new PhD student in our lab!
March 31, 2013
RPG featured in the IEEE Spectrum News and Gizmodo
Our Easter video featuring a ground and an aerial robot was featured
in IEEE Spectrum News
and Gizmodo, the famous technology review blogs. Read the
articles: IEEE Spectrum and Gizmodo.
December 1, 2012
Three new visiting PhD Students
Welcome to Chiara Troiani from INRIA, Volker Grabe from Max Planck
Institute, and Damiano
Verda from University of Genoa, who will join us for six months.
December 1, 2012
Two new PhD Students
Welcome to Matthias Faessler and Elias Mueggler as new PhD students
in our lab!
December 19, 2012
Student Projects Available for Spring 2013
UZH and ETH Students are welcome to apply for a project at our lab.
— More
information
November 1, 2013
Four new members
We welcome Dr. Matia Pizzoli and Dr. Andras Majdik, our two new
postdocs, and to Yanhua Jiang
and Volker Grabe, our new visiting PhD students!
September 16, 2013
New visiting postdoc
Welcome to Dr. Andrea Censi, our new visiting postdoc for three
months!
September 1, 2012
Davide Scaramuzza at TEDxZurich
Prof. Davide Scaramuzza has been invited to give a talk at TEDxZurich
on October
25, 2012.
July 7, 2012
RSS Workshop
Join the talk about Christian Forster's work on Collaborative
Visual SLAM with Multiple
MAVs at the RSS
workshop on integration of perception with control
and navigation for
resource-limited, highly dynamic, autonomous systems.
May 17, 2012
Davide Scaramuzza wins European Young Researcher Award 2012
Congratulations! Download the press
release.
May 1, 2012
New PhD Student
We welcome Christian Forster as new PhD student in our lab!
April 23, 2012
sFly on IEEE News
The European project sFly, coordinated by Davide Scaramuzza, gets a
log of media attention
and gets featured on IEEE News. Read it here.
