Autonomous Vision-Based Navigation: a Ground and Flying Robot Perspective

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.

About the Speaker :  Davide Scaramuzza (1980, Italian) received his PhD (2008) in Robotics and Computer Vision at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His PhD thesis won the Robotdalen Scientific Award (sponsored by the European Union, IEEE, ABB, and Volvo). His thesis focused on visual navigation of robots. Afterwards, he stayed as a post-doc in the same lab, where he worked on autonomous navigation of micro aerial vehicles. In January 2011, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania for another post-doc. Since February 2012, he has been Assistant a Professor in Human-Oriented Robotics at the University of Zurich.
Currently, he is leader and scientific manager of the European project "sFly" (www.sfly.org), which focuses on autonomous navigation of teams of micro helicopters in urban, GPS-denied environments using vision as the main sensor modality.
He is co author of the 2nd edition of the book "Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots" (MIT Press), along with Prof. Roland Siegwart (ETH) and Prof. Illah Nourbakhsh (CMU).
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, Daimler, and Chrysler.
    Finally, he is reviewer for many internationally known conferences and journals. He is member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and author of several top ranked journals in both the robotics and computer vision communities.