Davide Scaramuzza

Professor and Director of the Robotics and Perception Group

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Short Biography

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Davide Scaramuzza (Italian) is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at the University of 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, a Facebook Distinguished Faculty Research Award, two NASA TechBrief Awards, 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 served as a consultant for the United Nations on topics such as disaster response and disarmament, as well as the Fukushima Action Plan on Nuclear Safety He also consulted several drones and computer-vision companies, to which he has also transferred research results. In 2015, he co-founded Zurich-Eye, today Facebook Zurich, which developed the world-leading virtual-reality headset, Oculus Quest, which sold over 10 million units. In 2020, he co-founded SUIND, which developes smart agricultural drones. He was also the strategic advisor of Dacuda, today Magic Leap Zurich.

Many aspects of his research have been prominently featured in broader media, such as The New York Times, The Economist, Forbes, 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) 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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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.

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 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

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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 Machine Learning. Specifically, he investigates the use of standard cameras, neuromorphic 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 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 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 (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 first AI vs. Human drone race, where the AI vision-based drone outflew the world's best human pilots (link).

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 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, a Facebook Distinguished Faculty 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 (Science Robotics, PAMI, TRO, IJRR, IJCV, JFR, ICRA, IROS, RSS, CVPR, ICCV) and has released over forty Open Source software packages. His publications have been cited over 35,000 times (Google Scholar). His Google Scholar H-index is 86.

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 served as a consultant for the United Nations on topics such as disaster response and disarmament, as well as the Fukushima Action Plan on Nuclear Safety He also consulted several drones and computer-vision companies, to which he has also transferred research results. He also has entrepreneurial achievements. In 2015, he co-founded Zurich-Eye, dedicated to the commercialization of visual-inertial navigation solutions for mobile robots. In 2016, Zurich-Eye bacame Facebook Zurich (English, German, recent news), which developed the world-leading virtual-reality headset, Oculus Quest, which sold over 10 million units world wide (full story here). In 2020, he co-founded SUIND, which developes smart agricultural drones. He was also the strategic advisor of Dacuda, which developed inside-out virtual-reality solutions. Dacuda became Magic Leap Zurich in 2017..

Many aspects of his research have been prominently featured in broader media, such as The New York Times, The Economist, Forbes, 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 (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.