Welcome!
Welcome to the website of the Robotics and Perception Group (RPG) led by Prof. Davide Scaramuzza. The RPG was funded in early 2012 and is part of the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the University of Zurich.
Our mission is to develop autonomous machines that can navigate all by themselves using only onboard sensors, and mainly cameras, without relying on external reference systems, such as GPS or motion capture systems. Our interest encompasses both ground and micro flying robots, as well as multi-robot heterogeneous systems consisting of the combination of these two. We don't want our machines to be passive, but active, in that they should react to and navigate within the environment so as to gain the best knowledge out of it.
News
June 6, 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.
February 18, 2014
RPG gets Google research grant
Many thanks to Google!
December 2, 2013
Amazon Prime Air visits RPG
Daniel Buchmüller, co-founder and software engineer at Amazon Prime Air, visited us.
December 2, 2013
RPG featured on SRF 10vor10
The Robotics and Perception Group was featured in the news programme 10vor10 of the Swiss National TV (SRF). Check the video!
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.
November 5, 2013
RPG organizes IROS'13 Workshop on MAVs
We are organizing the first international workshop on Vision-based Closed-Loop Control and Navigation of Micro Helicopters in GPS-denied Environments, featuring amazing live flight demonstrations!
November 3, 2013
RPG presents four papers at IROS'13
We will be presenting papers in sessions Localization II (Nov. 4) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles IV (Nov. 5).
August 31, 2013
RPG was featured in a report about Scientifica 2013 on Radio SRF 1
The report can be found here.
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 autonomus 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 got featured in IEEE Spectrum News and Gizmodo, the famous technology review webblogs. Read the articles: IEEE Spectrum and Gizmodo.
February 28, 2013
RPG featured in the Weltwoche magazine
Weltwoche, a Swiss weekly magazine, talks about drones in the daily life. Read the article: "Der Spion von deinem Fenster" (German only).
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 F�ssler and Elias M�ggler 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.
Video Highlights
June 6, 2014
Our demo at the KUKA Innovation Award that shows the collaboration of flying and ground robots for search-and-rescue missions
February 25, 2014
Autonomous Vision-based Flight over a Disaster Zone using SVO (more details)
February 19, 2014
SVO - our new visual odometry pipeline for MAV state estimation. More details in our ICRA'14 paper.
February 19, 2014
Our latest work on probabilistic, monocular dense reconstruction in real time. More details in our ICRA'14 paper.
February 19, 2014
Our monocular pose estimation system that is released as open-source. More details in our ICRA'14 paper.
November 26, 2013
Torque Control of a KUKA youBot Arm (Master thesis of Benjamin Keiser)
August 7, 2013
Watch the video for our new IROS'13 paper "Air-Ground Localization and Map Augmentation Using Monocular Dense Reconstruction".
August 7, 2013
Check our new IROS'13 paper "MAV Urban Localization from Google Street View Data".
August 7, 2013
Watch the video for our new IROS'13 paper "Collaborative Monocular SLAM with Multiple Micro Aerial Vehicles".
October 25, 2012
Autonomous Vision-Controlled Micro Flying Robots: Davide Scaramuzza at TEDxZurich.