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.