The Man Behind the Drone Marvel Now Heading East

Prof. Davide Scaramuzza, recognised as a world expert in drone navigation and state-estimation set to traverse the Indian Robotics and AI realm!

Drones or so called UAV’s, tend to describe a range of aerial, terrestrial and aquatic robots. An exclusive few from the research labs of the University of Zurich have made it to the global headlines for the engineering and technical marvel it is. These drones developed by Prof. Davide Scaramuzza and his team are set to rule out all potential risks and limitations of the drone ecosystem, beginning with foldable drones that can fit through tight spaces to autonomous drones that can fly solo by imitating cars and bicycles. The most recent breakthrough by Davide and his team is the ‘Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance’ that equips drones with auto-dodge feature that would help dodge flying birds or nearby humans. Unlike traditional drones that record a set number of frames each second, the team has equipped drones with an advanced sensor known as an event camera, which only sends data when the pixels in its field of vision change in intensity. Thereby avoiding interference and explosions, extremely in favour of military and law enforcement deployments.

Prof. Davide Scaramuzza is here in India to share his expertise in ‘Visual Inertial Odometry and SLAM with both standard and event cameras’ at the International Conference on Advances in Robotics (AIR) which is a series of biennial conference organized by The Robotics Society to create a forum for presenting and exchanging new ideas by researchers and developers from India and abroad in the fields of robotics and its applications.

Catch hold of Prof. Davide Scaramuzza on 2nd July 2019 at IIT Madras and gain expert insights on robotics realm by registering here.

Davide Scaramuzza is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at both departments of Informatics (University of Zurich) and Neuroinformatics (University of Zurich and ETH Zurich), where he does research at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and neuroscience. Specifically he investigates the use of standard and neuromorphic cameras to enable autonomous, agile, navigation of micro drones in search-and-rescue scenarios. For his research contributions in vision-based navigation with standard and neuromorphic cameras, he was awarded the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, the SNSF-ERC Starting Grant, a Google Research Award, KUKA, Qualcomm, and Intel awards, the European Young Research Award, the Misha Mahowald Neuromorphic Engineering Award, and several conference paper awards. In 2015, he cofounded a venture, called Zurich-Eye, dedicated to the commercialization of visual-inertial navigation solutions for mobile robots, which later became Facebook-Oculus Switzerland and Oculus' European research hub. He was also the strategic advisor of Dacuda, an ETH spinoff dedicated to inside-out VR solutions, which later became Magic Leap Zurich. Many aspects of his research have been prominently featured in the popular press across the globe.

Davide Scaramuzza

Professor and Director of the Robotics and Perception Group / University of Zurich

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