Davide Scaramuzza

Professor and Director of the Robotics and Perception Group

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Biography

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Davide Scaramuzza is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at the University of Zurich. He did his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, and was a visiting professor at Stanford University. His research focuses on autonomous, agile navigation of micro drones using standard and event-based cameras. He pioneered autonomous, vision-based navigation of micro drones, which inspired the navigation algorithm of the NASA Mars helicopter and many drone companies. In 2022, his team demonstrated that an AI-powered drone could outperform the world champions of drone racing, a result published in Nature and featured on the magazine cover. His result marks the first time an AI defeated a human in the physical world (previous AI wins against humans at chess, Go, StanrCraft, and Gran Turismo were done on board games or video games). His research contributed significantly to visual-inertial state estimation, vision-based agile navigation of microdrones, and low-latency, robust perception with event cameras. His results have been transferred to many products, from drones to automobiles, cameras, AR/VR headsets, and mobile devices. He counts several entrepreneurial achievements: In 2015, he co-founded Zurich-Eye, which became Facebook-Meta Zurich and developed the world-leading virtual-reality headset Meta Quest. In 2020, he co-founded SUIND, which builds autonomous drones for precision agriculture. For his research contributions and tech transfer, he has won many awards, including a Kiyo-Tomiyasu IEEE Technical Field Award (won only by two other roboticists in the 20 years of existence of this award), an IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, a European Research Council Consolidator Grant, and many paper awards, including the 2023 IROS Best Paper Award, the 2022 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award, and the 2018 IEEE Transactions on Robotics Best Paper Award. He co-authored the book "Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots," published by MIT Press, which has sold over 10 thousand copies worldwide and is among the most used textbooks for teaching mobile robotics. He has been consulting the United Nations on disaster response, the Fukushima Action Plan, disarmament, and AI for good. Many aspects of his research have been featured in the media, such as The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and Forbes.

FOR A DETAILED BIOGRAPHY CHECK OUT HERE.

Contributions

Davide Scaramuzza is most known for:

• (1) first AI drone that defeated world champion drone racing pilots. video, paper, YouTube (Ours), YouTube (Nature).
• (2) pioneering contributions to learning agile vision-based flight. video, paper, research.
• (3) pioneering contributions to event-camera-based algorithms for mobile robots. 2014, 2017. Link to the research page.
• (4) pioneering contributions to visual-inertial-SLAM-based autonomous navigation of micro drones. ICRA'10 paper.
• (5) inventing the 1-point RANSAC algorithm, an effective and computationally efficient (1000 times faster) reduction of the standard 5-point RANSAC for visual odometry, when the vehicle motion is non-holonomic. IJCV'11 paper.
• (6) developing the Omnidirectional Camera Calibration Toolbox for MATLAB (OCamCalib), used at many companies (e.g., NASA, Philips, Bosch, Daimler, etc.). LINK. The toolbox is also part of the Matlab Computer Vision Toolbox.

Talks

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Podcasts

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Book

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I was the main author of this second edition to which I dedicated a full year of intense writing and literature research. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout, with 130 pages of new material on such topics as locomotion, perception, localization, and planning and navigation. Problem sets have been added at the end of each chapter. Bringing together all aspects of mobile robotics into one volume, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots can serve as a textbook or a working tool for beginning practitioners in their Master or PhD programs.

Select Patents

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Select Publications

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For a full list of publications, see here or Google Scholar.

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Hobbies

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In my free time, I like playing the piano and doing magic tricks. My passion for Magic started at the age of 14. I paid for my undergraduate studies by working part-time as a magician in restaurants, bars, and children parties, but I also did several performances on stage in public squares and theatres. Nowadays, I still play magic tricks for colleagues and friends and it has almost become a tradition during the social banquets of robotics conferences (usually ICRA and IROS) Below, you can see one of my latest shows during the Scientifica Zurich Science Festival. If you want to see more, you can check out my personal YouTube channel. But if you are looking for research videos, then you should check out my lab's YouTube channel! Here, you can read my interview from NCCR Robotics about my hobbies and how I decided to follow the academic career (link).

Long Biography

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Davide Scaramuzza was born in Terni, Italy. He received a Master's degree in Electronics and Information Engineering (2004, Summa cum Laude, thesis advisor: Prof. Paolo Valigi), from the Intelligent Systems, Automation and Robotics Laboratory of the Department of Engineering, of the University of Perugia, and a Ph.D. in Robotics and Computer Vision (2008, Ph.D. advisor: Prof. Roland Siegwart) from the Autonomous Systems Lab of the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering of ETH Zurich.

After a postdoc at the GRASP Lab of the University of Pennsylvania, (postdoc advisors: Prof. Vijay Kumar and Prof. Kostas Daniilidis), he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics of the University of Zurich in 2012. In 2017, he got promoted to Tenured Associated Professor with double affiliation with the Department of Neuroinformatics, a joint institute between the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. In 2019, he was Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of Stanford University.

His research lies at the intersection of Robotics, Computer vision, and Machine Learning. Specifically, he investigates the use of standard cameras, event-based cameras (also known as neuromorphic cameras), and inertial sensors for autonomous navigation of micro drones in challenging real-world scenarios, such as remote inspection and search and rescue after natural disasters. These scenarios raise fundamental research challenges, which are currently unsolved, but also touch him personally: he comes from the center of Italy, which is often affected by earthquakes (link).

From 2009 to 2012, he was the Scientific and Technical Coordinator of the European project sFly, which pioneered visual-inertial autonomous drone navigation in GPS-denied environments ([Bloesch, ICRA'10]) (which inspired the navigation algorithm of the NASA Ingenuity Mars helicopter and many drone companies) and led to the development of the PX4 autopilot (developed by Lorenz Meier and supported by Auterion), which is used by many commercial drone companies. From 2015 to 2018, he was part of one of only three teams selected by DARPA for the Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) Program to research autonomous, agile navigation of micro drones in GPS-denied environments ([Mohta, JFR'18]). In 2018, his team won the IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone Race (video, paper) and, in 2019, it ranked second in the AlphaPilot Drone Racing world championship (video, paper). In 2022, he and his team organized the world's first AI vs. Human drone race, where their AI-powered, vision-based autonomous drone outperformed two world champion drone-racing pilots (link). This result was published in Nature and was featured in the magazine cover. It marked the first time an AI defeated a human in the physical world (previous AI wins, such as IBM Deep Blue against Gary Kasparov at chess in 1996, or Google DeepMind AlphaGo against Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, or SONY Gran Turismo Sophy against the best human pilots in 2022, were conducted on board games on video games).

Davide Scaramuzza is recognized as a world expert in autonomous, vision-based drone navigation, visual odometry, and neuromorphic event cameras. To promote research development in these fields, he has edited several journal special issues and co-organized many international workshops on visual navigation of drones and event cameras.

For his research contributions to visual-inertial state estimation, vision-based agile navigation of microdrones, and low-latency, robust perception with event cameras, he won prestigious awards, such as a Kiyo Tomiyasu IEEE Technical Field Award (won only by two other roboticists in the 20 years of existence of this award), an IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant, an SNSF-ERC Starting Grant, a Google Research Award, a KUKA Innovation Award, two Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships, a European Young Researcher Award, a Misha Mahowald Neuromorphic Engineering Award, two Facebook Distinguished Faculty Awards, and several paper awards, including an ROS Best Paper Award, an IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award, and an IEEE Transactions on Robotics Best Paper Award. The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award and the Kiyo-Tomiyasu IEEE Technical Field Award represent the highest recognitions for early-career and mid-career achievements, respectively, by the IEEE and the Robotics and Automation societies. He has also been invited to speak at prestigious conferences, international workshops, and universities (full list in his CV).

He has published over 200 scientific articles (link) in top-ranked robotics and computer vision journals and conferences (Nature, Science Robotics, T-PAMI, T-RO, IJRR, IJCV, JFR, ICRA, IROS, RSS, CVPR, ICCV) and has released over 80 Open Source software packages. His publications have been cited over 47,000 times (Google Scholar). His Google Scholar H-index is 106.

He co-authored the second edition of the book "Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots", published by MIT Press in 2011. This book has sold over 10 thousand copies worldwide and is among the most used textbooks for teaching mobile robotics in universities.

He has served as a consultant for the United Nations on topics such as disaster response, disarmament, AI for good, and the Fukushima Action Plan on Nuclear Safety. He has also consulted several drones and computer-vision companies, to which he has also transferred research results. He also counts several entrepreneurial achievements. In 2015, he co-founded Zurich-Eye, which was dedicated to commercializing visual-inertial localization and mapping solutions for mobile robots. In 2016, Zurich-Eye became Facebook/Meta Zurich (English, German, recent news), which developed the world-leading virtual-reality headset, Oculus Quest, which sold over 20 million units worldwide (full story here). In 2020, he co-founded SUIND, which developes smart agricultural drones. He was also the strategic advisor of Dacuda, which developed the world's first mouse scanner (utilizing visual SLAM technology, video) and inside-out virtual-reality solutions. Dacuda became Magic Leap Zurich in 2017 (link).

Many aspects of his research have been prominently featured in broader media, such as The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Forbes, Discovery Channel, La Repubblica, Neue Zurcher Zeitung and also in technology-focused media, such as IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, Tech Crunch, Wired, and The Verge (full list here).

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Contact

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Address: University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15, Office 2.10, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland
Email: sdavide (at) ifi (dot) uzh (dot) ch (NB: for INTERNSHIP, PhD, and Postdoc applications, please read below)
Phone: +41 44 635 24 09

• INTERNSHIP applications: If you are seeking an internship in my lab you need to be enrolled in a Master program in your university. Applications from Bachelor students will not be answered. If you are a Master student and you wish to apply, please send me: 1) Your CV; 2) Transcripts of your Bachelor and Master grades; 3) a 2-page proposal containing: a) a description of the project you intend to do in my lab which is relevant to my research; b) comments on your experience in the area; c) related work, and d) a timeline of the project from the start to the end. Please make sure everything fits in two A4 page. Please do not send me reminders asking me the status of your application. I will answer only in case of positive feedback.
• PhD and Postdoc applications: check out my open positions here. Please notice that unsolicited applications will not be answered.