12:21 p.m.
Talk today at 15:30 at IDSIA
Galleria 1 Meeting room
Speaker: Davide Scaramuzza
Lab webpage: http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch
Homepage: https://sites.google.com/site/scarabotix/
Affiliation: University of Zurich, Artificial Intelligence Lab
Title: Vision-Based Navigation: a Ground and a Flying Robot Perspective
Abstract
Over the past two decades, we have assisted to a rapid research
progress in driver assistance systems. Some of these systems have even
reached the market and have become nowadays an essential tool for
driving. GPS navigation systems are probably the most popular ones.
They have revolutionized the way of traveling and certainly
facilitated research towards fully autonomous navigation in outdoor
environments. However, there are still numerous challenges that have
to be solved in view of fully autonomous navigation of cars in
cluttered environments. This is especially true in urban environments,
where the requirements for an autonomous system are very high.
Another research area that lately received a lot of
interest—especially after the earthquake in Fukushima, Japan—is that
of micro aerial 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.
Finally, I will present our current research projects.
Short Biography
Davide Scaramuzza is Professor of Robotics at the Artificial
Intelligence Lab of the University of Zurich - where he leads the
Robotics and Perception Group - and Adjunct Faculty at ETH Zurich of
the Master in Robotics Systems and Control. He received his PhD (2008)
in Robotics and Computer Vision at ETH Z¨urich. He was Postdoc a both
ETH Zurich and the University of Pennsylvania, 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 Robotdalen
Scientific Awards (2009) and the European Young Researcher Award
(2012), sponsored by the IEEE and the European Commission. 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 (a popular
software simulation tool), which, besides thousands of downloads
worldwide, is also currently used at NASA, Philips, Bosch, and
Daimler. 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.