In this work, we address one of the main challenges towards autonomous drone flight in complex environments, which is flight through narrow gaps.

Transcript below.

In this interview, Audrow Nash speaks with Davide Scaramuzza, Assistant Professor of Robotics at the University of Zurich and leader of the Robotics and Perception Group, about autonomous unmanned vehicles (UAV) that navigate using only on-board systems—no GPS or motion capture systems.

We developed a new technology that allows a quadrotor to automatically recover and stabilize from any initial condition without relying on external infrastructure like GPS. The technology allows the quadrotor system to be used safely both indoors and out, to recover stable flight after a GPS loss or system failure. And because the recovery is so quick, it even works to recover flight after an aggressive throw, allowing you to launch a quadrotor simply by tossing it in the air like a baseball.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-11-24

In this guest lecture, Thierry Bücheler from the AI Lab, University of Zurich, Switzerland, talks about collective intelligence, quality and critical mass, and gives examples of where collective intelligence can be useful.

Four researchers from Davide Scaramuzza’s Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, have won the prestigious KUKA Innovation Award (20.000 EUR) for their project “Collaboration of Flying and Ground Robots for Search-And-Rescue Missions” at the AUTOMATICA trade fair in Munich.

The ShanghAI lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

This concludes the ShanghAI Lecture series of 2012. After a wrap-up of the class, we announce the winners of the EmbedIT and NAO competitions and end with an outlook of the future of the ShanghAI Lectures.

Then there are three guest lectures: Tamás Haidegger (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) on surgical robots, Aude Billard (EPFL) on how the body shapes the way we move (and how humans can shape the way robots move), and Jamie Paik (EPFL) on soft robotics.

In the 9th part of the ShanghAI Lecture series, we look at ontogenetic development as Rolf Pfeifer talks about the path from locomotion to cognition. This is followed by two guest lectures: The first one by Ning Lan (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China) on cortico-muscular communication in the nervous system, the second by Roland Siegwart (ETH Zurich) on the design and navigation of robots with various moving abilities.

In this 8th part of the ShanghAI Lecture series, Rolf Pfeifer looks into differences between human and computer memory and shows several types of “memories”. In the first guest lecture, Vera Zabotkina (Russian State University for the Humanities) talks about cognitive modeling in linguistics; in the second guest lecture, José del R. Millán (EPFL) demonstrates a brain-computer interface.

In the 7th part of the ShanghAI Lecture series, Rolf Pfeifer talks about collective intelligence. Examples include ants that find the shortest path to a food source, robots that clean up, and birds that form flocks. In the guest lecture, István Harmati (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary) discusses the coordination of multi-agent robotic systems.

In this sixth part of the ShanghAI Lecture series, Rolf Pfeifer introduces the topic “Artificial Evolution” and gives examples of evolutionary processes in artificial intelligence. The first guest lecture, by Francesco Mondada (EPFL) is about the use of robots in daily life; in the second guest lecture, Robert Riener (ETH Zürich) talks about rehabilitation robots.

This is the second part of the “Design Principles for Intelligent Systems” ShanghAI Lecture. After Rolf Pfeifer’s class, Barry Trimmer (Tufts University, USA) gives a guest presentation about soft robotics.

This is the fourth part of the ShanghAI Lecture series, where Rolf Pfeifer starts introducing a set of “Design Principles” for intelligent systems, as outlined in the book “How the Body Shapes the Way We Think”.

In the first guest lecture, Dario Floreano (EPFL) talks about biologically inspired flying robots, and then Pascal Kaufmann (AI Lab, UZH) gives a short overview of the “Roboy” project.

In this lecture Rolf Pfeifer presents some first steps toward a “theory of intelligence”., followed by guest lectures by Vincent C. Müller (Anatolia College, Greece) on computers and cognition, and Alex Waibel (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany/Carnegie Mellon University, USA) who demonstrates a live lecture translation system.