Davide Scaramuzza, PhD
University of Zurich
Professor and Director of the Robotics and Perception Group
Switzerland
Human-Level Performance with Autonomous Vision-based Drones
Abstract
To be announced.
Biography of the speaker
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 microdrone navigation using standard and event-based cameras. He pioneered autonomous, vision-based navigation of drones, which inspired the navigation algorithm of the NASA Mars helicopter and many drone companies. He made major contributions to visual-inertial state estimation, vision-based agile navigation of microdrones, and low-latency, robust perception with event cameras, which were transferred to many products, from drones to automobiles, cameras, AR/VR headsets, and mobile devices. In 2022, his team demonstrated that an AI-controlled, vision-based drone could outperform the world champions of drone racing, a result that was published in Nature. He serves as a consultant for the United Nations on disaster response and disarmament. He won many awards, such as a European-Research-Council Consolidator Grant, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, a Google Research Award, two NASA TechBrief Awards, and many paper awards. In 2015, he co-founded Zurich-Eye, today Meta Zurich, which developed the world-leading virtual-reality headset: Meta Quest. In 2020, he co-founded SUIND, which builds autonomous drones for precision agriculture. Many aspects of his research have been featured in the media, such as The New York Times, The Economist, and Forbes.