Davide Scaramuzza leads the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich and is Adjunct Faculty at ETH Zurich.

In the excellent TED talk below, he tells us about his work in visual control of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Rather than use GPS, which is sometimes unavailable indoors and in obstructed environments, or external sensing such as a Vicon system, Scaramuzza relies on vision and onboard sensing and computation to control flying robots. Using this visual information, the robot is able to build a map of the environment and self-localize within this map (SLAM). He tells us about the principles behind onboard visual SLAM, how multiple robots can work together to build a map and shows us a demo of the technology in action.