News
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.
