News
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.
Then 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 environmentn at low altitutes (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 reknown 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 our 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 theatres 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 reknown 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 sciene 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 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.
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
May 19, 2017
Check our our latest work on active exposure control for robust visual odometry in high dynamic range environments:
ICRA'17 paper.
May 5, 2017
We are awarded the 2017 Misha Mahowald Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of neuromorphic engineering.
Press release.
April 4, 2017
We release the first public, large-scale dataset recorded with a drone in an urban environmentn at low altitutes (5-15m).
Dataset here.
December 20, 2016
Check our our latest work, EVO, on Event-based, 6-DOF Parallel Tracking and Mapping in Real-time:
RA-L'16 paper.
December 20, 2016
Check our our latest work on rotational motion estimation with an Event Camera:
RA-L'16 paper.
September 27, 2016
Check our our latest work on agile quadrotor flight through narrow gaps with onboard sensing and computing:
More info here.
September 12, 2016
Check out our latest work on Event-based Multi-View Stereo, which uses a single, continuously moving event camera for accurate 3D reconstruction! BMVC'16 paper.
August 19, 2016
Our latest work on search and rescue robotics is a system for training a terrain classifier "on-the-spot" in only 60 seconds. Our flying robot can then use this classifier to guide a ground robot through a disaster area. Details are in our ISER'16 paper.
July 19, 2016
We designed an event-based 6-DOF pose tracking pipeline with the latency of 1 microsecond using the DVS sensor for very high speed (>500 deg/sec) and high-dynamic-range (> 130 dB) applications, where all standard cameras fail. All the details in our Arxiv paper.
July 19, 2016
We designed an event-based 6-DOF visual odometry pipeline with the latency of 1 microsecond using the DAVIS sensor. All the details in our IROS'16 paper and EBCCSP'16 paper.
February 10, 2016
We used Deep Neural Networks to teach our drones to recognize and follow forest trails to search for missing people. Journal Paper. More info.
May 25, 2016
Our active volumetric reconstruction software framework is now released open source. More details in our ICRA'16 paper.
March 30, 2015
Our latest work on failure recovery from aggressive flight and how to launch a quadrotor by throwing it in the air! ICRA'15 paper.
March 30, 2015
Our latest work on autonomous landing-site detection and landing with onboard monocular vision! ICRA'15 paper.
February 1, 2015
To celebrate our lab's 3-year anniversary, we summarize in this clip our main achievements, projects, awards, exhibitions, and upcoming videos!
October 24, 2014
Our latest work on Aerial-guided Navigation of a Ground Robot among Movable Obstacles.
More details in our SSRR'14 paper.
October 7, 2014
Our latest work on Appearance-based Active, Monocular, Dense Reconstruction for Micro Aerial Vehicles.
More details in our RSS'14 paper.
September 6, 2014
Our quadrotor demo trailer: autonomous navigation, live dense 3D reconstruction, and collaborative grasping.
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)
November 20, 2013
RPG was featured on the German-French TV channel ARTE in their science programme X:enius. The French version is available here.
October 25, 2012
Autonomous Vision-Controlled Micro Flying Robots: Davide Scaramuzza at TEDxZurich.
