In this interview, Audrow Nash speaks with Dr. Davide Scaramuzza, Assistant Professor of Robotics at the University of Zurich and leader of the Robotics and Perception Group, about autonomous unmanned vehicles (UAV) that navigate using only on-board systems—no GPS or motion capture systems.
Below are some videos of Scaramuzza’s research.
Davide Scaramuzza
Davide Scaramuzza (1980, Italian) is Assistant Professor of Robotics at the University of Zurich. He is founder and director of the Robotics and Perception Group, where he develops cutting-edge research on low-latency vision and visually-guided micro aerial vehicles. He received his PhD (2008) in Robotics and Computer Vision at ETH Zurich (with Roland Siegwart). He was Postdoc at both ETH Zurich and the University of Pennsylvania (with Vijay Kumar and Kostas Daniilidis). From 2009 to 2012, he led the European project “sFly”, which introduced the world’s first autonomous navigation of micro quadrotors in GPS-denied environments using vision as the main sensor modality. For his research contributions, he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (2014), the IEEE Robotics and Automation Early Career Award (2014), a Google Research Award (2014). He coauthored the book “Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots” (MIT Press). He is author of the first open-source Omnidirectional Camera Calibration Toolbox for MATLAB, also used at NASA, Bosch, and Daimler. He is also author of the 1-point RANSAC algorithm, an effective and computationally efficient reduction of the standard 5-point RANSAC for visual odometry, when vehicle motion is non-holonomic. He is Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions of Robotics and has numerous publications in top-ranked robotics and computer vision journals, such as PAMI, IJCV, T-RO, IJRR, JFR, AURO. His hobbies are piano and magic tricks.
Links:
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- Robotics and Perception Group website
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