Davide Scaramuzza
Professor and Director of the Robotics and Perception Group
BOOK SELECT PUBLICATIONS CV TED TALK
VISUAL ODOMETRY TUTORIAL HOBBIES OCamCalib TOOLBOX CONTACT
Short Biography

Davide Scaramuzza (Italian) is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at both departments of Informatics (University of Zurich) and Neuroinformatics (joint between the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich),
where he directs the Robotics and Perception Group. His research lies at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, using standard cameras and event cameras, and aims to enable autonomous, agile, navigation of micro drones in search-and-rescue applications.
After a Ph.D. at ETH Zurich (with Roland Siegwart) and a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania (with Vijay Kumar and Kostas Daniilidis),
from 2009 to 2012, he led the European project sFly, which introduced the PX4 autopilot and pioneered visual-SLAM-based autonomous navigation of micro drones in GPS-denied environments.
From 2015 to 2018, he was part of the DARPA FLA program(Fast Lightweight Autonomy) to research autonomous, agile navigation of micro drones
in GPS-denied environments. In 2018, his team won the IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone Race and in 2019 it ranked second in the AlphaPilot Drone Racing world championship.
For his research contributions to autonomous, vision-based, drone navigation and event cameras, he won prestigious awards, such as a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, an SNSF-ERC Starting Grant,
a Google Research Award, the KUKA Innovation Award, two Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships, the European Young Research Award, the Misha Mahowald Neuromorphic Engineering Award, and several paper awards.
He coauthored the book "Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots" (published by MIT Press; 10,000 copies sold) and more than 100 papers on robotics and perception published in top-ranked journals (Science Robotics, TRO, T-PAMI, IJCV, IJRR) and conferences (RSS, ICRA, CVPR, ICCV, CORL, NeurIPS).
He has served as a consultant for the United Nations's International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Fukushima Action Plan on Nuclear Safety,
and several drones and computer-vision companies, to which he has also transferred research results.
In 2015, he cofounded Zurich-Eye, today Facebook Zurich, which developed the visual-inertial SLAM system running in Oculus Quest VR headsets.
He was also the strategic advisor of Dacuda, today Magic Leap Zurich. In 2020, he cofounded SUIND, which develops camera-based safety solutions for commercial drones.
Many aspects of his research have been prominently featured in wider media, such as The New York Times, BBC News, Discovery Channel, La Repubblica, Neue Zurcher Zeitung and
also in technology-focused media, such as IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, Tech Crunch, Wired, The Verge.
FOR A DETAILED BIOGRAPHY CHECK OUT HERE.
Contributions
Davide Scaramuzza is most known for:
- (1) pioneering contributions to learning agile vision-based flight. video, paper, research.
- (2) pioneering contributions to event-camera-based algorithms for mobile robots. 2014, 2017. Link to the research page.
- (3) pioneering contributions to visual-inertial-SLAM-based autonomous navigation of micro drones. ICRA'10 paper.
- (4) 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.
- (5) authoring 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.
In the Press (full list here)
23.07.2021 Forbes
"AI-Controlled Drone Racer Has Beaten Human Pilots For The First Time" [ Link ]
09.01.2020 New York Times
"A drone from the University of Zurich is an engineering and technical marvel..." (full article)
29.05.2019 BBC
Tech gives drone the ability to avoid mid-air crashes [ Link ]
21.04.2015BBC
"Drones Under Control" [ Link ]
16.05.2019 La Repubblica
L'intervista - Davide Scaramuzza: "Ma devono imparare a muoversi da soli" [ Link ]
14.12.2018 La Repubblica
Droni con 'ali pieghevoli' per passare ovunque[ Link ]
14.02.2018La Repubblica
Tra alberi e palazzi ora il drone fa lo slalom [ Link ]
27.07.2019Neue Zurcher Zeitung
"In der Forschung zu autonom fliegenden Drohnen spielt die Uni Z�rich weltweit an vorderster Front mit. Jetzt kann sich deren Robotics-Team an einem internationalen Drohnenrennen in den USA beweisen" [ Link ]
30.08.2018Neue Zurcher Zeitung
"Wie Robotikprofessor Scaramuzza Erdbebenopfern mit Drohnen helfen will [ Link ]
24.01.2018Neue Zurcher Zeitung
"So kommen Drohnen sicher durch die Stadt" [ Link ]
13.12.2018IEEE Spectrum
"Foldable Drone Changes Its Shape in Mid-Air" [ Link ]25.01.2018IEEE Spectrum
"AI-Powered Drone Mimics Cars and Bikes to Navigate Through City Streets" [ Link ]
09.12.2016MIT Technology Review
"Watch This Robotic Quadcopter Fly Aggressively Through Narrow Gaps"[ Link ]
27.06.2018Wired
Drones Just Learned to Fly Solo, Which Means Pro Racers May Soon Meet Their Match [ Link ]
11.02.2016Wired
"This drone uses AI to find its way through a forest"[ Link ]
Video Highlights
June 11, 2020
AI Drone faster than Humans? Time-Optimal Planning for Quadrotor Waypoint Flight Read our Time-optimal planning for quadrotor waypoint flight paper for further details.
June 11, 2020
Watch our drone flying very agile acrobatics maneuvers! Read our Deep Drone Acrobatics paper for further details.
May 25, 2020
Watch our performance at the AlphaPilot Challenge! Read our RSS 2020 paper for further details.
March 18, 2020
Watch our drone play dodgeball using an event camera! Read our Science Robotics paper for further details.
Jan 14, 2020
High speed and HDR video reconstruction with event cameras (T-PAMI paper).
December 13, 2018
The foldable drone (RAL'18 paper).
September 27, 2016
Check out our work on agile quadrotor flight through narrow gaps with onboard sensing and computing: More info here.
Awards
- 2020.07.16 - RSS Best Systems Paper Award for AlphaPilot
- 2020.07.16 - RSS Best Paper Award finalist for Deep Drone Acrobatics
- 2019.10.12 - ERC (European Research Council) Consolidator Grant (2M EUR) (press release)
- 2019.05.24 - ICRA 2019 workshop on SLAM Benchmarking, Best Paper Award, PDF
- 2019.05.22 - 2018 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL) Best Paper Award Honorable Mention (finalist three our of 720 papers, for "Ultimate SLAM", paper, video.
- 2019.04.09 - Drone Hero Contest 2019 - Innovative Drone for the foldable drone
- 2018.11.01 - Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2018 Best System Paper Award, PDF
- 2018.10.03 - IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone Race 1st place winner
- 2018.05.14 - IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) Best Paper Award, PDF, Press coverage
- 2018.05.10 - Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for Henri Rebecq (40k Euros)
- 2018.03.14 - EURobotic Georges Giralt PhD Thesis Award finalist for Dr. Christian Forster)
- 2017.09.27 - IROS 2017 Autonomous Drone Race 2nd place winner
- 2017.09.27 - IROS 2017 Safety Security and Rescue Robotics Paper Award finalist
- 2017.07.01 - Intel Network of Intelligent System Award (170k USD)
- 2017.06.01 - RSS' 17 Best Student Paper Award Finalist
- 2017.06.01 - Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering, for our "pathbreaking applications of neuromorphic engineering to robot navigation"
- 2017.03.01 - EU Robotics Transfer Award to Fotokite
- 2016.05.12 - Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for Elias Mueggler (40k Euros)
- 2016.10.01 - IROS'16 Best Application Paper Finalist
- 2016.09.20 - BMVC'16 Best Industry Paper Award
- 2016.03.30 - AAAI Video Award nomination
- 2015.06.01 - RSS'15 Best Paper Award finalist!
- 2014.11.21 - SNSF-ERC Starting Grant (1.5 million EUR for 5 years)
- 2014.06.01 - IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award for my "major contributions to robot vision and visually-guided micro aerial vehicles".
- 2014.06.01 - KUKA Innovation Award (20,000 EUR)
- 2014.04.01 - Google Research Award
- 2012.06.01 - European Young Researcher Award 2012 - Sponsored by EU and Euroscience
- 2010.03.30 - Finalist of the George Giralt EURON PhD award (for the best European PhD thesis)
- 2009.09.09 - ROBOTDALEN Scientific Award for my PhD thesis. Sponsored by EU, IEEE, ABB.
- 2009.09.09 - European Micro Aerial Vehicle competition.
- 2005.04.01 - FEDERCOMIN-AICA Master thesis Award (best Italian Master thesis in ICT).
- 2004.07.02 - Best student of the year Award (800 EUR), Ternana Opera Educatrice, Terni, Italy.
- 1998.06.01 - Finalist at the Italian Mathematical Olympiads, Cesenatico, Italy
Talks
2018
- 2018.10.26 - Univesity of Maryland - Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar, College Park (invited seminar)
- 2018.10.05 - IROS18 Workshop on Alternative Sensing for Robotics, (keynote speaker)
- 2018.10.05 - IROS18 Workshop Vision-based Drones: What's next?, (co-organizer)
- 2018.09.17 - Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, (invited seminar)
- 2018.09.04 - INTEL Network of Intelligent System Workshop, Munich (keynote speaker)
- 2018.07.10 - MIT Media Lab, Advances in Imaging Series, (invited remote seminar (Skype))
- 2018.06.12 - 2nd International Symposium on Aerial Robotics (keynote speaker), Slides
- 2018.06.04 - ISPRS18 TC II Symposium Towards Photogrammetry 2020, Italy, Riva del Garda, (keynote speaker), Slides
- 2018.05.25 - ICRA18 Workshop on The interplay between optimal estimation for improved action and optimal action for improved estimation, Brisbane, (keynote speaker)
- 2018.05.25 - ICRA18 Workshop on Aerial Robotic Inspection and Maintenance: Research Challenges, Field Experience and Industry Needs, (keynote speaker)
- 2018.05.21 - ICRA18 Workshop on Human Robot Interaction with UAVs, Brisbane, (keynote speaker)
- 2018.05.21 - ICRA18 Workshop on Reproducible Research in Robotics, Brisbane, (keynote speaker)
- 2018.05.04 - IST Austria Young Scientist Symposium (plenary speaker)
- 2018.04.18 - SPIE Defense and Security Conference, Session on Neuromorphic Sensing, Orlando, (keynote speaker)
- 2018.04.18 - Princeton University (invited seminar)
- 2018.04.13 - University of Souther Denmark (invited seminar)
- 2018.03.13 - ERF18 Workshop on Aerial Robotics for Industrial Inspection, Maintenance & Transportation, Tampere, Mar., 2018 (keynote speaker)
- 2018.02.05 - Computer Vision Winter Workshop, Prague, (keynote speaker)
Book
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.

Introduction to autonomous mobile robots 2nd Edition (hardback)
A Bradford Book, The MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0-262-01535-6, February, 2011
Select Publications
For a full list of publications, see here or Google Scholar.

Deep Drone Acrobatics
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2020
Best Paper Nominee!

AlphaPilot: Autonomous Drone Racing
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2020
Best Systems Paper Award!

Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance for Quadrotors with Event Cameras
Science Robotics, March 18, 2020.

High Speed and High Dynamic Range Video with an Event Camera
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2019.

Deep Drone Racing: From Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2019
YouTube PDF Code
EKLT: Asynchronous, Photometric Feature Tracking using Events and Frames
International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2019.

VIMO: Simultaneous Visual Inertial Model-based Odometry and Force Estimation
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Freiburg, 2019
PDF
A 64mW DNN-based Visual Navigation Engine for Autonomous Nano-Drones
IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2019
Video, PDF, Code
The Foldable Drone: A Morphing Quadrotor that can Squeeze and Fly
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2019.

Beauty and the Beast: Optimal Methods Meet Learning for Drone Racing.
This approach was used to win the IROS 2018 Autonomous Drone Race.
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2019.

Deep Drone Racing: Learning Agile Flight in Dynamic Environments
Conference on Robotic Learning (CoRL), Zurich, 2018.
Oral Presentation. Oral Acceptance Rate: 4.0%.

Event-based, 6-DOF Camera Tracking from Photometric Depth Maps
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 40, Issue 10, 2018.

Asynchronous, Photometric Feature Tracking using Events and Frames
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Munich, 2018.
Oral Presentation. Oral Acceptance Rate: 2.4%.

A Real-Time Game Theoretic Planner for Autonomous Two-Player Drone Racing
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Pittsburgh, 2018

A Unifying Contrast Maximization Framework for Event Cameras, with Applications to Motion, Depth and Optical Flow Estimation
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Salt Lake City, 2018.
Spotlight Presentation.

DroNet: Learning to Fly by Driving
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2018.

Ultimate SLAM? Combining Events, Images, and IMU for Robust Visual SLAM in HDR and High Speed Scenarios
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2018.
Best Paper Award finalist (2nd out of 720 papers)!

Differential Flatness of Quadrotor Dynamics Subject to Rotor Drag for Accurate Tracking of High-Speed Trajectories
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2018.

EMVS: Event-Based Multi-View Stereo - 3D Reconstruction with an Event Camera in Real-Time
International Journal of Computer Vision, 2018.

Real-time Visual-Inertial Odometry for Event Cameras using Keyframe-based Nonlinear Optimization
British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), London, 2017.
Oral Presentation. Oral acceptance Rate: 5.6%

Rapid Exploration with Multi-Rotors: A Frontier Selection Method for High Speed Flight
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Vancouver, 2017.
IROS'17 Best Search and Rescue Robotics Paper Award Finalist!

Fast Trajectory Optimization for Agile Quadrotor Maneuvers with a Cable-Suspended Payload
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Boston, 2017.
RSS'17 Best Student Paper Award Finalist!
Oral Presentation: Acceptance Rate 4%.

Aggressive Quadrotor Flight through Narrow Gaps with Onboard Sensing and Computing using Active Vision
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017.

On-Manifold Preintegration for Real-Time Visual-Inertial Odometry
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol 33, no. 1, pp. 1-21, Feb. 2017.
IEEE Transactions on Robotics' Best Paper Award 2017
RSS'15 Best Paper Award Finalist!
Oral Presentation: Acceptance Rate 4%

The Event-Camera Dataset and Simulator: Event-based Data for Pose Estimation, Visual Odometry, and SLAM
International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 36, Issue 2, pages 142-149, Feb. 2017.

Low-Latency Visual Odometry using Event-based Feature Tracks
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Daejeon, 2016.
IROS'16 Best Application Paper Award Finalist! Highlight Talk: Acceptance Rate 2.5%

EMVS: Event-based Multi-View Stereo
British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), York, 2016.
BMVC'16 Best Industry Paper Paper Award! Oral Talk: Acceptance Rate 7%

A Machine Learning Approach to Visual Perception of Forest Trails for Mobile Robots
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), Vol. 1, Issue 2, pp. 661-667, Jul. 2016
AAAI'16 Best Video Award finalist!

Air-ground Matching: Appearance-based GPS-denied Urban Localization of Micro Aerial Vehicles
Journal of Field Robotics, 2015.

Automatic Re-Initialization and Failure Recovery for Aggressive Flight with a Monocular Vision-Based Quadrotor
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Seattle, 2015.

Appearance-based Active, Monocular, Dense Reconstruction for Micro Aerial Vehicles
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Berkely, 2014.

Low-Latency Event-Based Visual Odometry
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Hong Kong, 2014.

SVO: Fast Semi-Direct Monocular Visual Odometry
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Hong Kong, 2014.

REMODE: Probabilistic, Monocular Dense Reconstruction in Real Time
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Hong Kong, 2014.

Vision-Controlled Micro Flying Robots: from System Design to Autonomous Navigation and Mapping in GPS-denied Environments.
IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, Vol. 21, Issue 3., 2014.

Calibration by Correlation using Metric Embedding from Non-metric Similarities
IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 35, Issue 10, 2013.

1-Point-RANSAC Structure from Motion for Vehicle-Mounted Cameras by Exploiting Non-holonomic Constraints
International Journal of Computer Vision, Volume 95, Issue 1, 2011.

Visual Odometry: Part I - The First 30 Years and Fundamentals
IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, Volume 18, issue 4, 2011.
Hobbies
In my free time, I like playing piano and magic tricks. My passion for Magic was born at age 14. I paid my undegraduate studies working part-time as 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 show during the Scientifica Science Festival at ETH Zurich. If you would like to see more, you can check out my personal YouTube channel! But notice that, if you are looking for robot videos, then you should check out my lab's YouTube channel! Here, you can read my interview from NCCR Robotics about my hobby and how I decided to follow the academic career (LINK)!

Long Biography
Davide Scaramuzza was born in Terni, Italy.
He received a Master degree in Electronics and Information Engineering (2004, Summa cum Laude, adviser: Paolo Valigi),
from the Dep. of Engineering, of the University of Perugia,
and a PhD in Robotics and Computer Vision (2008, adviser: Roland Siegwart) from the
Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering of ETH Zurich.
After a postdoc at the GRASP Lab of the University of Pennsylvania,
(advisers: Vijay Kumar and Kostas Daniilidis), he was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Zurich in 2012.
He got promoted to Tenured Associated Professor in 2017 with double affiliation with the Departments of
Informatics (University of Zurich) and the Dep. of Neuroinformatics (University of Zurich and ETH Zurich).
His research lies at the intersection of Robotics, Computer vision, and Neuroscience. Specifically, he investigates the use of standard, event cameras, and inertial sensors to enable autonomous navigation
of micro drones in challenging real-world scenarios, such as remote inspection and search and rescue after natural disasters.
These scenarios bring up fundamental robotic problems, which are currently unsolved by the worldwide research community, but also touch him personally: he comes from the center of Italy, which is most affected by earthquakes (link).
From 2009 to 2012, he led the European project sFly, which pioneered visual-inertial autonomous drone navigation
in GPS-denied environments ([Bloesch, ICRA'10]) and led to the development of the PX4 autopilot (developed by Lorenz Meier),
today a standard tool in over half a million hobby and commercial drones.
From 2015 to 2018, he was part of one the three teams selected by DARPA for the Fast Lightweight Autonomy Program (FLA), the first one 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).
Davide Scaramuzza is recognized as a world expert in drone navigation and state-estimation with both standard cameras, event cameras, and inertial sensors.
To promote research development in these fields, he has edited 3 journal special issues, has organized 6 international workshops on visual navigation of drones and 2 international workshops on event-based vision.
For his research contributions to autonomous, vision-based, drone navigation and event cameras, he won prestigious awards, such as an ERC Consolidator Grant, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, an SNSF-ERC Starting Grant,
a Google Research Award, the KUKA Innovation Award, two Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships, the European Young Research Award, the Misha Mahowald Neuromorphic Engineering Award, and several paper awards.
The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award represents the highest recognition for early-career achievements by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
He has also been invited to speak at prestigious conferences, international workshops, and universities (full list in his CV).
He has published over 100 scientific articles (link) in top-ranked robotics and computer vision journals and conferences (PAMI, TRO, IJRR, IJCV, JFR, ICRA, IROS, RSS, CVPR, ICCV) and has released over ten Open Source software
packages. His publications have been cited over 12,000 times (Google Scholar). His Google Scholar H-index is 41.
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 (UN) International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Fukushima Action Plan on Nuclear Safety,
and several drone and computer-vision companies, to which he has also transferred research results for product development.
He also has entrepreneurial achievements. In 2015, he co-founded Zurich-Eye (financed through the technology incubator Wyss-Zurich), dedicated to the commercialization of visual-inertial navigation solutions
for mobile robots. Zurich-Eye is today Facebook-Oculus Zurich (English, German, recent news).
Davide Scaramuzza was also the strategic advisor of Dacuda, dedicated to inside-out VR solutions, which today is Magic Leap Zurich.
Many aspects of his research have been prominently featured in the popular press, such as Discovery Channel, BBC, NBC News, several national and international newspapers and TV channels (full list).
Contact
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 never answer. 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.