Our Awards and Achievements

28.09.2023 - 2023 IEEE/RSJ IROS Best Paper Award

Our work "Autonomous Power Line Inspection with Drones via Perception-Aware MPC" wins the best paper award at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2023. Congratulations to all collaborators! Paper, video, code.


25.09.2023 - 2023 IROS Workshop Robotic Perception and Mapping: Frontier Vision and Learning Techniques

Our work "HDVIO: Improving Localization and Disturbance Estimation with Hybrid Dynamics VIO" wins the best paper award at IROS23 Workshop Robotic Perception and Mapping: Frontier Vision and Learning Techniques. Congratulations to all collaborators! Paper and video.


25.09.2023 - 2023 IROS Workshop Robotic Perception and Mapping: Frontier Vision and Learning Techniques

Our work in collaboration with ASL, ETH Zurich, "Attending Multiple Visual Tasks for Own Failure Detection" wins the best paper award at IROS23 Workshop Robotic Perception and Mapping: Frontier Vision and Learning Techniques. Congratulations to all collaborators! Paper.


28.07.2023 - 2023 Frontier of Science Award

Our Science Robotics 2021 paper wins the prestigious Frontier of Science award in the category "Robotics, Science and Systems". Congratulations to Antonio Loquercio and his co-authors! Paper, open-source code, and video.


08.06.2023 - Manasi Muglikar awarded UZH Candoc Grant

Our PhD student Manasi Muglikar is awarded the UZH Candoc Grant 2023 for her outstanding research. Congratulations!


03.05.2023 - ICRA Workshop Poster Award

Our PhD student Yunlong Song wins the 2023 ICRA "Agile Movements: Animal Behaviour, Biomechanics, and Robot Devices" workshop poster award with his work "Fly fast with Reinforcement Learning".


25.04.2023 - CVPR Award Candidate

We are honored that our 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) paper "Data-driven Feature Tracking for Event Cameras" was selected as an award candidate. Congratulations to all collaborators! Check out the paper here.


13.04.2023 - Asude Aydin wins the UZH Award for her Master Thesis

Our Master student Asude Aydin has received the UZH Award 2023 for her outstanding master thesis. Check out her paper here, which is based on her Master thesis.


07.03.2023 - Fang Nan wins ETH Medal for his Master Thesis

Our Master student Fang Nan has received the ETH Medal 2023 and the Willi Studer Prize for his outstanding master thesis.


27.12.2022 - NCCR Robotics Most Impactful Paper Award

Congratulations to Alessandro Giusti and his co-authors for winning the NCCR Robotics Most Impactful Paper Award for the paper "A Machine Learning Approach to Visual Perception of Forest Trails for Mobile Robots" (PDF).

16.09.2022 - NCCR Robotics Master Thesis Award

Congratulations to our former Master student Michelle Ruegg for winning the NCCR Robotics Master Thesis Award, for her thesis on combining frames and events for asynchronous multi-modal monocular depth prediction! The thesis was supervised by Daniel Gehrig and Mathias Gehrig.

04.07.2022 - 2022 George Giralt Award

Congratulations to our former PhD student Antonio Loquercio for winning the 2022 George Giralt PhD Award, the most prestigious award for PhD dissertations in robotics in Europe, for his work on learning vision-based high-speed drone flight! We are very proud of you!
PhD thesis PDF, Video of the PhD defense, Google Scholar profile, Personal page

27.05.2022 - RAL Best Paper Award

Our paper Autonomous Quadrotor Flight Despite Rotor Failure With Onboard Vision Sensors: Frames vs. Events wins the prestigious IEEE RAL Best Paper Award.

PDF YouTube Code


20.10.2021 - AI 2000 Robotics Most Influential Scholars

Davide Scaramuzza receives the Robot Most Influential Scholars Honorable Mention. Check out the list of the award recipients here.


26.09.2021 - NASA Tech Briefs Award

Our work on controlling a quadrotor after motor failure with only onboard vision sensors is the winner of the Aerospace and Defense category in the 2021 NASA Tech Briefs "Create the Future" contest out of over 700 participants worldwide! Here the list of all the winners and finalists here.


13.09.2021 - Zichao Zhang receives the Annual Award from the Faculty of Business and Economics at University of Zurich

The University of Zurich Annual Award 2021 goes to Zichao Zhang for his dissertation Active Robot Vision: From State Estimation to Motion Planning (Link). Congratulations!


13.09.2021 - Zichao Zhang finalist at the EURobotic Georges Giralt PhD Thesis Award

Our former PhD student Zichao Zhang was finalist at the EURobotic Georges Giralt PhD Thesis Award out of 60 candidates.


10.05.2021 - IEEE Transactions on Robotics Best Paper Award Honorable Mention

Our paper Deep Drone Racing: from Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization (PDF, YouTube 1, YouTube 2, Code) wins the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Robotics Best Paper Award Honorable Mention.


16.07.2020 - RSS Best Systems Paper Award and Best Paper Award Finalist!

Our paper AlphaPilot: Autonomous Drone Racing (Paper, Presentation) won the Best Systems Paper Award at RSS! Additionally, our paper Deep Drone Acrobatics (Paper, Presentation) was finalist for the Best Paper Award.


27.05.2020 - Tim Taubner wins ETH Medal for his Master Thesis

Our Master student Tim Taubner 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.


08.03.2020 - Henri Rebecq finalist at the EURobotic Georges Giralt PhD Thesis Award

Our former PhD student Henri Rebecq was finalist at the EURobotic Georges Giralt PhD Thesis Award out of 60 candidates.


10.12.2019 - ERC Consolidator Grant

Davide Scaramuzza was awarded the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant (2 million Euros) toward research on vision based agile flight. Link


06.12.2019 - 2nd Place at AlphaPilot 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! Link


01.12.2019 - 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!


26.11.2019 - Facebook Distinguished Faculty Award

Davide Scaramuzza was awarded the Facebook Distinguished Faculty Award for his outstanding contributions.


30.09.2019 - NASA Tech Briefs Award

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.


13.09.2019 - NCCR Best PostDoc Paper Award

Jeffrey Delmerico, former PostDoc in our lab, won the NCCR best PostDoc paper award with his paper A Benchmark Comparison of Monocular Visual-Inertial Odometry Algorithms for Flying Robots.


08.07.2019 - ETH Robotics Summer School Challenge

Manasi Muglikar, PhD student in our lab, won the ETH Robotics Summer School Robot Competition.


24.05.2019 - ICRA 2019 workshop on SLAM Benchmarking

Zichao Zhang, PhD student in our lab, received the best paper award at the ICRA 2019 workshop on SLAM Benchmarking with his paper "Rethinking Trajectory Evaluation for SLAM: a Probabilistic, Continuous-Time Approach".


22.05.2019 - 2018 IEEE RAL Best Paper Award Honorable Mention

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. Read the paper here and watch the video here.


08.05.2019 - 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 the ICCV paper here.


09.04.2019 - Drone Hero Contest 2019 - Innovative Drone

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. Paper, Video.


01.11.2018 - CoRL 2018 Best System Paper Award

We won the Best Systems Paper Award at the 2018 International Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) with our paper titled "Deep Drone Racing: Learning Agile Fllight in Dynamic Environments". Paper, Video.


03.10.2018 - IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone Race 1st place winner

We 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.


14.05.2018 - IEEE TRO Best Paper Award

Our paper on IMU pre-integration received 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.


10.05.2018 - Qualcomm Innovation Award

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"!


14.03.2018 - Christian Forster finalist at the EURobotic Georges Giralt PhD Thesis Award

Our former PhD student Christian Forster was finalist at the EURobotic Georges Giralt PhD Thesis Award, 2nd out of 41 candidates.


27.09.2017 - IROS 2017 Autonomous Drone Race 2nd place winner

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.


27.09.2017 - IROS 2017 Safety Security and Rescue Robotics Paper Award finalist

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.


01.07.2017 - Intel Network of Intelligent System Award

We are proud to announce that our lab is now part of the Intel Network of Intelligent System Award (170k USD).


01.06.2017 - RSS' 17 Best Student Paper Award Finalist

Our paper Fast Trajectory Optimization for Agile Quadrotor Maneuvers with a Cable-Suspended Payload, accepted for oral presentation at RSS'17, was nominated as a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award! Check out the paper here and the video here.


05.05.2017 - 2017 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering

We won the 2017 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering for our "pathbreaking applications of neuromorphic engineering to robot navigation". Press release available here


20.04.2017 - ETH Medal for Best Master thesis

Antonio Loquercio, PhD student in our lab, won the ETH Medal for his outstanding Master thesis.


24.10.2016 - Fritz Kutter Award for Industry Related Thesis in Computer Science

Our former student and current Research Assistant Timo Horstschäfer won the 2016 Fritz Kutter Award for Industry Related Master Thesis in Computer Science with his Master Thesis "Parallel Tracking, Depth Estimation, and Image Reconstruction with an Event Camera".


14.10.2016 - Best IROS'16 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%.


22.09.2016 - Best BMVC'16 Industry Paper Award

Our paper EMVS: Event-based Multi-View Stereo was selected as an oral talk (acceptance rate of 7%) and received the BMVC'16 Best Industry Paper Award (sponsored by Nvidia and BMVA). Check out the video for further details.


30.03.2016 - AAAI Video Award nomination

Our work on deep learning for autonomous exploration in forests was nominated for the best AAAI video Award. Journal paper. More info. YouTube video.


10.05.2016 - Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

Elias Mueggler, a PhD student in our lab, won a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship with his proposal "Event-based Vision for High-Speed Robotics".


14.01.2016 - Titus Cieslewski won a prize from Homegate at HackZurich

Titus Cieslewski, a PhD student in our lab, won 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.


13.06.2015 - RSS'15 Best Paper Award Finalist

Christian Forster's RSS'15 paper IMU Preintegration on Manifold for Efficient Visual-Inertial Maximum-a-Posteriori Estimation is Best Paper Award Finalist at RSS'15.


21.11.2014 - SNSF-ERC Starting Grant

Prof. Davide Scaramuzza received a 1.5 million EUR from the SNSF-ERC Starting Grant.


29.10.2014 - SSRR'14 Best Paper Award Finalist

Our SSRR'14 paper on Aerial-guided Navigation of a Ground Robot among Movable Obstacles was selected as Finalist for the Best Paper Award. Watch the video.


29.10.2014 - NCCR Best PostDoc 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.


21.10.2014 - Master student wins Fritz Kutter Award

Our former Master student Basil Huber won the 2014 Fritz Kutter Award for Industry Related Master Thesis in Computer Science with his Master Thesis "High-Speed Pose Estimation using a Dynamic Vision Sensor".


04.06.2014 - IEEE Robotics and Automation Early Career Award

Prof. Davide Scaramuzza received the 2014 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award "for his major contributions to robot vision and visually-guided micro aerial vehicles".


04.06.2014 - 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.


18.02.2014 - Google Faculty Research Award

Prof. Davide Scaramuzza won the Google Faculty Research Award.


26.11.2013 - 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.


17.05.2012 - European Young Researcher Award 2012

Prof. Davide Scaramuzza won the European Young Researcher Award 2012.