Thursday, February 27, 2014, 16:00
OSGA/E6
D. Scaramuzza, U. of Zurich
Abstract:
In the last two years, we have heard a lot of news about drones, small autonomous flying vehicles. Flying robots have numerous advantages over ground vehicles: they can get access to environments where humans cannot get access to and, furthermore, they have much more agility than any other ground vehicle. Unfortunately, their dynamics makes them extremely difficult to control and this is particularly true in GPS-denied environments. In this talk, I will present challenges and results for both ground vehicles and flying robots, from localization in GPS-denied environments to motion estimation. I will show several experiments and real-world applications where these systems perform successfully and those where their applications is still limited by the current technology.
Davide Scaramuzza (1980, Italian) is Professor of Robotics at the University of Zurich and Adjunct Faculty at ETH Zurich. He is founder and director of the Robotics and Perception Group (http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch). He received his PhD (2008) in Robotics and Computer Vision at ETH Zurich. He was Postdoc at both ETH Zurich (with Roland Siegwart) and the University of Pennsylvania (with Vijay Kumar), where he worked on autonomous navigation of micro aerial vehicles. From 2009 to 2012, he led the European project 'SFLY', which focused on autonomous navigation of micro helicopters in GPS-denied environments using vision as the main sensor modality. For his research, he was awarded the IEEE Robotics and Automation Early Career Award (2014), a Google Research Award (2014), the European Young Researcher Award (2012), and the Robotdalen Scientific Award (2009). He is coauthor of the 2nd edition of the book “Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots” (MIT Press). He is also author of the first open-source Omnidirectional Camera Calibration Toolbox for MATLAB, which, besides thousands of downloads worldwide, is also currently used at NASA, Philips, Bosch, and Daimler. Finally, he is author of several top-ranked robotics and computer vision journals. His research interests are field and service robotics, intelligent vehicles, and computer vision. Specifically, he investigates the use of cameras as the main sensors for robot navigation, mapping, exploration, reasoning, and interpretation. His interests encompass both ground and flying vehicles.