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Check out our #RSS2024 paper "#MPCC++: Model Predictive Contouring Control for Time-Optimal Flight with Safety Constraints." Model Predictive Contouring Control (MPCC) has shown promising results for agile robotics applications, including car and drone racing. Existing approaches struggle to introduce safety considerations, often resulting in crashes. What does it take...

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Davide Scaramuzza

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17,888 views • 1 year ago •via X (Twitter)

Science & TechnologyEducationHealth & Wellness#RSS2024#MPCC
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3 Comments

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Julian Fried1 year ago

Very cool

Charles Zhang's profile picture
Charles Zhang1 year ago

cool

Senish Khadka's profile picture
Senish Khadka1 year ago

Damn, but how did you localize the drones position? Imu?

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Check out our #ICRA2024 paper "Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control." Model-free #reinforcementlearning (RL) is known for its strong task performance and flexibility in optimizing general reward formulations. On the other hand, #ModelPredictiveControl (MPC) benefits from robustness and online replanning capabilities. We combine both approaches by introducing a new framework called Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control. The key idea is to embed a differentiable MPC within an Actor-Critic RL framework. The proposed approach leverages the short-term predictive optimization capabilities of MPC with the exploratory and end-to-end training properties of RL. The resulting policy effectively manages both short-term decisions through the MPC-based actor and long-term prediction via the critic network, unifying the benefits of both model-based control and end-to-end learning. We validate our method in simulation and the real world with a quadcopter across various high-level tasks. We show that the proposed architecture can achieve real-time control performance, learn complex behaviors via trial and error, and retain the predictive properties of the MPC to better handle out-of-distribution behavior. Paper: Full Video with more details: Kudos to Ángel Romero, Yunlong Song IEEE ICRA University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub Aerial Core AUTOASSESS European Research Council (ERC)
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Check out our #ICRA2024 paper "Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control." Model-free #reinforcementlearning (RL) is known for its strong task performance and flexibility in optimizing general reward formulations. On the other hand, #ModelPredictiveControl (MPC) benefits from robustness and online replanning capabilities. We combine both approaches by introducing a new framework called Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control. The key idea is to embed a differentiable MPC within an Actor-Critic RL framework. The proposed approach leverages the short-term predictive optimization capabilities of MPC with the exploratory and end-to-end training properties of RL. The resulting policy effectively manages both short-term decisions through the MPC-based actor and long-term prediction via the critic network, unifying the benefits of both model-based control and end-to-end learning. We validate our method in simulation and the real world with a quadcopter across various high-level tasks. We show that the proposed architecture can achieve real-time control performance, learn complex behaviors via trial and error, and retain the predictive properties of the MPC to better handle out-of-distribution behavior. Paper: Full Video with more details: Kudos to Ángel Romero, Yunlong Song IEEE ICRA University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub Aerial Core AUTOASSESS European Research Council (ERC)

Davide Scaramuzza

34,874 views • 2 years ago

Check out our latest work, "Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control: Differentiable Optimization meets Reinforcement Learning for Agile Flight," published in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, where we reconcile #OptimalControl and #ReinforcementLearning, achieving the same super-human performance, but with superior generalizability, as our previous model-free deep RL! Code released! PDF: Code: Full Video: Model-free #ReinforcementLearning (RL) is known for its strong task performance and flexibility in optimizing general reward formulations. On the other hand, #ModelPredictiveControl (MPC) provides robustness, constraint handling, and powerful online replanning capabilities. In this work, we extend our previous AC-MPC paper (Romero, ICRA'24) by taking a deeper look at how both approaches can be unified. We introduce and extend Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control (AC-MPC), a framework that embeds a differentiable MPC inside an Actor-Critic RL architecture. This integration allows the MPC-based actor to perform short-term predictive optimization, while the critic facilitates long-horizon learning and exploration. We conduct a comprehensive study that highlights AC-MPC’s key advantages: - Better out-of-distribution generalization, both against unknown disturbances and changes in the quadrotor dynamics - Improved sample efficiency - A novel empirical analysis uncovering a relationship between the critic’s value function and the MPC cost function, providing deeper insight into their interplay. We validate our method in simulation and the real world on a quadcopter flying at superhuman speeds of up to 21 m/s, matching state-of-the-art model-free RL performance, and retaining the predictive structure of MPC for more reliable out-of-distribution behavior. Reference: Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control: Differentiable Optimization meets Reinforcement Learning for Agile Flight IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2025 PDF: Full Video: Code: Kudos to Ángel Romero, Elie Aljalbout, Yunlong Song! University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub AUTOASSESS European Research Council (ERC) UZHai
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Check out our latest work, "Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control: Differentiable Optimization meets Reinforcement Learning for Agile Flight," published in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, where we reconcile #OptimalControl and #ReinforcementLearning, achieving the same super-human performance, but with superior generalizability, as our previous model-free deep RL! Code released! PDF: Code: Full Video: Model-free #ReinforcementLearning (RL) is known for its strong task performance and flexibility in optimizing general reward formulations. On the other hand, #ModelPredictiveControl (MPC) provides robustness, constraint handling, and powerful online replanning capabilities. In this work, we extend our previous AC-MPC paper (Romero, ICRA'24) by taking a deeper look at how both approaches can be unified. We introduce and extend Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control (AC-MPC), a framework that embeds a differentiable MPC inside an Actor-Critic RL architecture. This integration allows the MPC-based actor to perform short-term predictive optimization, while the critic facilitates long-horizon learning and exploration. We conduct a comprehensive study that highlights AC-MPC’s key advantages: - Better out-of-distribution generalization, both against unknown disturbances and changes in the quadrotor dynamics - Improved sample efficiency - A novel empirical analysis uncovering a relationship between the critic’s value function and the MPC cost function, providing deeper insight into their interplay. We validate our method in simulation and the real world on a quadcopter flying at superhuman speeds of up to 21 m/s, matching state-of-the-art model-free RL performance, and retaining the predictive structure of MPC for more reliable out-of-distribution behavior. Reference: Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control: Differentiable Optimization meets Reinforcement Learning for Agile Flight IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2025 PDF: Full Video: Code: Kudos to Ángel Romero, Elie Aljalbout, Yunlong Song! University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub AUTOASSESS European Research Council (ERC) UZHai

Davide Scaramuzza

26,960 views • 5 months ago

We are excited to share that our paper “Low-Latency Event-Based Velocimetry for Quadrotor Control in a Narrow Pipe” published in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics! One year in the making! PDF: Video: We focus on autonomous quadrotor flight in narrow pipes, where self-induced, unsteady airflow can significantly affect stability and control. Our approach closes the loop using real-time flow field measurements: an #EventCamera-based smoke velocimetry method provides low-latency airflow estimates, which are used by a learning-based disturbance estimator and integrated into a reinforcement-learning controller. The results are improved hovering and lateral translation performance, helping make flight in confined spaces more stable and safer! Kudos to Leonard Bauersfeld Leonard Bauersfeld! Reference: Low-Latency Event-Based Velocimetry for Quadrotor Control in a Narrow Pipe, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2026 European Research Council (ERC) UZH IfI UZH Space Hub University of Zurich Swiss Robotics UZH Science UZHai AUTOASSESS IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) #DVS Prophesee
2:11

We are excited to share that our paper “Low-Latency Event-Based Velocimetry for Quadrotor Control in a Narrow Pipe” published in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics! One year in the making! PDF: Video: We focus on autonomous quadrotor flight in narrow pipes, where self-induced, unsteady airflow can significantly affect stability and control. Our approach closes the loop using real-time flow field measurements: an #EventCamera-based smoke velocimetry method provides low-latency airflow estimates, which are used by a learning-based disturbance estimator and integrated into a reinforcement-learning controller. The results are improved hovering and lateral translation performance, helping make flight in confined spaces more stable and safer! Kudos to Leonard Bauersfeld Leonard Bauersfeld! Reference: Low-Latency Event-Based Velocimetry for Quadrotor Control in a Narrow Pipe, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2026 European Research Council (ERC) UZH IfI UZH Space Hub University of Zurich Swiss Robotics UZH Science UZHai AUTOASSESS IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) #DVS Prophesee

Davide Scaramuzza

50,131 views • 3 months ago

We are thrilled to share our breakthrough research on "Agile Flight from Pixels without State Estimation," to be presented and live-demonstrated at #RSS2024 next week! You heard well: no state estimation means no explicit visual localization, no SLAM, no VIO, and no IMU! Paper: Video (Narrated): Last year, we demonstrated that #ReinforcementLearning (RL) policies could outperform world-champion drone-racing pilots using the same quadrotor hardware; however, unlike human pilots, these policies continuously estimated an explicit state from known gate positions, the camera feed, and inertial measurements (IMU). In this new work, we tackle the challenge of learning vision-based drone racing using an end-to-end reinforcement learning approach that eliminates the need for IMU data or explicit state estimation. Like professional pilots, we go directly from images to control commands. The training is facilitated by an asymmetric actor-critic with access to privileged information. To overcome the computational complexity during image-based RL training, we use an appropriate sensor representation, which can be efficiently simulated during training without rendering images. We achieve agile flight at speeds up to 40 km/h with accelerations up to 2 g's. Although our demonstration focuses on drone racing, we believe that our method has an impact beyond drone racing and can serve as a foundation for future research into real-world applications in structured environments. Besides the paper presentation, we will also give a live demo next Tuesday and Wednesday between and hrs at TU Delft: Reference: Ismail Geles*, Leonard Bauersfeld*, Angel Romero, Jiaxu Xing, Davide Scaramuzza "Demonstrating Agile Flight from Pixels without State Estimation" Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2024. Kudos to Ismail Geles Leonard Bauersfeld Ángel Romero Jiaxu Xing! University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub Aerial Core AUTOASSESS European Research Council (ERC)
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We are thrilled to share our breakthrough research on "Agile Flight from Pixels without State Estimation," to be presented and live-demonstrated at #RSS2024 next week! You heard well: no state estimation means no explicit visual localization, no SLAM, no VIO, and no IMU! Paper: Video (Narrated): Last year, we demonstrated that #ReinforcementLearning (RL) policies could outperform world-champion drone-racing pilots using the same quadrotor hardware; however, unlike human pilots, these policies continuously estimated an explicit state from known gate positions, the camera feed, and inertial measurements (IMU). In this new work, we tackle the challenge of learning vision-based drone racing using an end-to-end reinforcement learning approach that eliminates the need for IMU data or explicit state estimation. Like professional pilots, we go directly from images to control commands. The training is facilitated by an asymmetric actor-critic with access to privileged information. To overcome the computational complexity during image-based RL training, we use an appropriate sensor representation, which can be efficiently simulated during training without rendering images. We achieve agile flight at speeds up to 40 km/h with accelerations up to 2 g's. Although our demonstration focuses on drone racing, we believe that our method has an impact beyond drone racing and can serve as a foundation for future research into real-world applications in structured environments. Besides the paper presentation, we will also give a live demo next Tuesday and Wednesday between and hrs at TU Delft: Reference: Ismail Geles*, Leonard Bauersfeld*, Angel Romero, Jiaxu Xing, Davide Scaramuzza "Demonstrating Agile Flight from Pixels without State Estimation" Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2024. Kudos to Ismail Geles Leonard Bauersfeld Ángel Romero Jiaxu Xing! University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub Aerial Core AUTOASSESS European Research Council (ERC)

Davide Scaramuzza

27,891 views • 1 year ago

We are excited to share our #ICRA2026 paper "Dream to Fly: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Drone Flight"! Paper: Video: Can we use Model-Based #ReinforcementLearning (MBRL) to fly a drone from pixels to commands? In this work, we train quadrotor navigation policies from scratch using #WorldModels, mapping raw onboard camera pixels directly to control commands, much like a human pilot! While model-free methods like PPO are sample-inefficient and struggle in this setting, we leverage #MBRL to train visuomotor policies capable of agile flight through a racetrack using only raw pixel observations, no explicit state estimation needed. A key finding: because our policies are trained end-to-end directly from pixels, we no longer need the perception-aware reward term used in previous methods. Instead, this behavior emerges naturally! The policies learn to guide the camera toward feature-rich areas of the observation space on their own. Kudos to Ángel Romero Ashwin Shenai Ismail Geles Elie Aljalbout Reference: "Dream to Fly: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Drone Flight" Angel Romero*, Ashwin Shenai*, Ismail Geles, Elie Aljalbout, Davide Scaramuzza IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Vienna, 2026. European Research Council (ERC) AUTOASSESS UZH IfI University of Zurich UZH Science Prophesee SynSense UZH Space Hub Swiss Robotics NCCR Robotics
1:21

We are excited to share our #ICRA2026 paper "Dream to Fly: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Drone Flight"! Paper: Video: Can we use Model-Based #ReinforcementLearning (MBRL) to fly a drone from pixels to commands? In this work, we train quadrotor navigation policies from scratch using #WorldModels, mapping raw onboard camera pixels directly to control commands, much like a human pilot! While model-free methods like PPO are sample-inefficient and struggle in this setting, we leverage #MBRL to train visuomotor policies capable of agile flight through a racetrack using only raw pixel observations, no explicit state estimation needed. A key finding: because our policies are trained end-to-end directly from pixels, we no longer need the perception-aware reward term used in previous methods. Instead, this behavior emerges naturally! The policies learn to guide the camera toward feature-rich areas of the observation space on their own. Kudos to Ángel Romero Ashwin Shenai Ismail Geles Elie Aljalbout Reference: "Dream to Fly: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Drone Flight" Angel Romero*, Ashwin Shenai*, Ismail Geles, Elie Aljalbout, Davide Scaramuzza IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Vienna, 2026. European Research Council (ERC) AUTOASSESS UZH IfI University of Zurich UZH Science Prophesee SynSense UZH Space Hub Swiss Robotics NCCR Robotics

Davide Scaramuzza

15,782 views • 2 months ago

Check out our #ICRA2024 paper "Contrastive Initial State Buffer for Reinforcement Learning," which tackles the sample inefficiency in #ReinforcementLearning head-on. Code released! We introduce an approach agnostic to the underlying RL algorithm: the Contrastive Initial State Buffer. This tool strategically selects states from past experiences and uses them to initialize the agent in the environment to guide it toward more informative states. Our experiments on drone racing and legged locomotion show that our method achieves higher task performance while also speeding up training convergence. Reference: Nico Messikommer, Yunlong Song, Davide Scaramuzza Contrastive Initial State Buffer for Reinforcement Learning IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024. PDF: Code: Video: Kudos to Messikommer Yunlong Song Aerial Core European Research Council (ERC) University of Zurich UZH Space Hub IEEE ICRA UZH Science
1:12

Check out our #ICRA2024 paper "Contrastive Initial State Buffer for Reinforcement Learning," which tackles the sample inefficiency in #ReinforcementLearning head-on. Code released! We introduce an approach agnostic to the underlying RL algorithm: the Contrastive Initial State Buffer. This tool strategically selects states from past experiences and uses them to initialize the agent in the environment to guide it toward more informative states. Our experiments on drone racing and legged locomotion show that our method achieves higher task performance while also speeding up training convergence. Reference: Nico Messikommer, Yunlong Song, Davide Scaramuzza Contrastive Initial State Buffer for Reinforcement Learning IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024. PDF: Code: Video: Kudos to Messikommer Yunlong Song Aerial Core European Research Council (ERC) University of Zurich UZH Space Hub IEEE ICRA UZH Science

Davide Scaramuzza

13,846 views • 2 years ago

We are excited to be among the very first groups selected by NVIDIA Robotics to test the new NVIDIA #Thor. We have managed to run a #VisionLanguageModel (Qwen 2.5 VL) for semantic understanding of the environment, along with a monocular depth model (#DepthAnything v2), for safe autonomous navigation, all onboard. No cloud, no internet connection required! The video shows a simple result obtained in just two weeks of work. Kudos to Leonard Bauersfeld Jiaxu Xing Ismail Geles Yannick Armati for making this possible! #ComputerVision #Robotics University of Zurich UZH Space Hub UZH IfI European Research Council (ERC)
1:07

We are excited to be among the very first groups selected by NVIDIA Robotics to test the new NVIDIA #Thor. We have managed to run a #VisionLanguageModel (Qwen 2.5 VL) for semantic understanding of the environment, along with a monocular depth model (#DepthAnything v2), for safe autonomous navigation, all onboard. No cloud, no internet connection required! The video shows a simple result obtained in just two weeks of work. Kudos to Leonard Bauersfeld Jiaxu Xing Ismail Geles Yannick Armati for making this possible! #ComputerVision #Robotics University of Zurich UZH Space Hub UZH IfI European Research Council (ERC)

Davide Scaramuzza

31,433 views • 9 months ago

We are excited to share our latest work, "Learning on the Fly: Rapid Policy Adaptation via Differentiable Simulation", where a policy learns to adapt in the real world to unknown disturbances within 5 seconds, both with and without explicit state estimation, directly from visual features. Code released! PDF: Project Page: Starting from a simple analytical dynamics model, the system continuously learns residual dynamics from real-world data and embeds the refined model into a differentiable simulator. This enables fast, gradient-based policy updates that are far more sample-efficient than classical #ReinforcementLearning. We demonstrate rapid adaptation in <5 seconds in agile quadrotor control under challenging conditions, including added payloads, wind disturbances, and large sim-to-real gaps. In real-world experiments, our method reduces hovering error by up to 81% compared to L1-MPC and 55% compared to PPO-based adaptive methods. It also operates directly from visual features without explicit state estimation. Reference: “Learning on the Fly: Rapid Policy Adaptation via Differentiable Simulation” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2026 PDF: Video: Code: Website: Kudos to Michael Pan, Jiaxu Xing, Rudolf Reiter, Yifan Zhai, Elie Aljalbout! UZH Space Hub UZH IfI European Research Council (ERC) AUTOASSESS UZH Science University of Zurich
1:06

We are excited to share our latest work, "Learning on the Fly: Rapid Policy Adaptation via Differentiable Simulation", where a policy learns to adapt in the real world to unknown disturbances within 5 seconds, both with and without explicit state estimation, directly from visual features. Code released! PDF: Project Page: Starting from a simple analytical dynamics model, the system continuously learns residual dynamics from real-world data and embeds the refined model into a differentiable simulator. This enables fast, gradient-based policy updates that are far more sample-efficient than classical #ReinforcementLearning. We demonstrate rapid adaptation in <5 seconds in agile quadrotor control under challenging conditions, including added payloads, wind disturbances, and large sim-to-real gaps. In real-world experiments, our method reduces hovering error by up to 81% compared to L1-MPC and 55% compared to PPO-based adaptive methods. It also operates directly from visual features without explicit state estimation. Reference: “Learning on the Fly: Rapid Policy Adaptation via Differentiable Simulation” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2026 PDF: Video: Code: Website: Kudos to Michael Pan, Jiaxu Xing, Rudolf Reiter, Yifan Zhai, Elie Aljalbout! UZH Space Hub UZH IfI European Research Council (ERC) AUTOASSESS UZH Science University of Zurich

Davide Scaramuzza

19,103 views • 5 months ago

We are excited to share our #CORL2024 paper (oral) on "Learning Quadruped Locomotion Using Differentiable Simulation" done in collaboration with Sangbae Kim Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We present a new way to learn to walk in minutes without parallelization, outperforming PPO in sample efficiency! PDF: Video: We present a new framework for learning quadruped locomotion. By leveraging differentiable simulation for policy optimization, our approach achieves fast convergence and stable training, significantly outperforming model-free #ReinforcementLearning methods like PPO in sample efficiency. The key enabler is to combine a high-fidelity, non-differentiable simulator for forward dynamics with a simplified surrogate model for gradient backpropagation. Our framework enables learning quadruped walking in simulation in minutes without parallelization. When augmented with GPU parallelization, our approach allows the quadruped robot to master diverse locomotion skills on challenging terrains in minutes. This work highlights one of the first successful real-world applications of differentiable simulation for quadruped robots, offering a compelling alternative to traditional RL methods. Kudos to Yunlong Song! UZH Science University of Zurich UZH Space Hub UZH IfI European Research Council (ERC) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)MechE
1:13

We are excited to share our #CORL2024 paper (oral) on "Learning Quadruped Locomotion Using Differentiable Simulation" done in collaboration with Sangbae Kim Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We present a new way to learn to walk in minutes without parallelization, outperforming PPO in sample efficiency! PDF: Video: We present a new framework for learning quadruped locomotion. By leveraging differentiable simulation for policy optimization, our approach achieves fast convergence and stable training, significantly outperforming model-free #ReinforcementLearning methods like PPO in sample efficiency. The key enabler is to combine a high-fidelity, non-differentiable simulator for forward dynamics with a simplified surrogate model for gradient backpropagation. Our framework enables learning quadruped walking in simulation in minutes without parallelization. When augmented with GPU parallelization, our approach allows the quadruped robot to master diverse locomotion skills on challenging terrains in minutes. This work highlights one of the first successful real-world applications of differentiable simulation for quadruped robots, offering a compelling alternative to traditional RL methods. Kudos to Yunlong Song! UZH Science University of Zurich UZH Space Hub UZH IfI European Research Council (ERC) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)MechE

Davide Scaramuzza

15,511 views • 1 year ago

We are excited to share our latest work, "Superhuman Safe and Agile Racing through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning," done in collaboration with Google DeepMind . Autonomous drones have reached superhuman speed in isolation, but what happens when multiple agents share the same airspace? Paper: Website: Video: Using league-based self-play, we train #ReinforcementLearning agents that race against a diverse, evolving population of opponents. Through this competitive training, sophisticated behaviors emerge without explicit programming: strategic overtaking, proactive collision avoidance, and even awareness of aerodynamic downwash from nearby drones. In real-world multi-player races at speeds exceeding 80kph (50 mph) and accelerations up to 7g, our agents outperform a five-time Swiss national drone racing champion while reducing collision rates by 50% compared to single-agent baselines. Crucially, training against diverse artificial opponents enables zero-shot generalization to human pilots, achieving over 90% race completion in mixed human-AI races with up to four competitors. A key insight: human pilots adopt riskier strategies when trailing, leading to more crashes under competitive pressure. Our learned policies, by contrast, maintain consistent safety margins regardless of race standing, a property essential for deploying autonomous systems alongside humans. Also, the multi-agent self-play policies are more robust than those trained independently, suggesting that training in competitive environments is not only key to winning races but also to learning safer, more reliable autonomy for real-world multi-robot systems. Kudos to Ismail Geles, Leonard Bauersfeld, Markus Wulfmeier! Ismail Geles Leonard Bauersfeld Markus Wulfmeier European Research Council (ERC) UZH IfI University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub Swiss Robotics NCCR Robotics
1:47

We are excited to share our latest work, "Superhuman Safe and Agile Racing through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning," done in collaboration with Google DeepMind . Autonomous drones have reached superhuman speed in isolation, but what happens when multiple agents share the same airspace? Paper: Website: Video: Using league-based self-play, we train #ReinforcementLearning agents that race against a diverse, evolving population of opponents. Through this competitive training, sophisticated behaviors emerge without explicit programming: strategic overtaking, proactive collision avoidance, and even awareness of aerodynamic downwash from nearby drones. In real-world multi-player races at speeds exceeding 80kph (50 mph) and accelerations up to 7g, our agents outperform a five-time Swiss national drone racing champion while reducing collision rates by 50% compared to single-agent baselines. Crucially, training against diverse artificial opponents enables zero-shot generalization to human pilots, achieving over 90% race completion in mixed human-AI races with up to four competitors. A key insight: human pilots adopt riskier strategies when trailing, leading to more crashes under competitive pressure. Our learned policies, by contrast, maintain consistent safety margins regardless of race standing, a property essential for deploying autonomous systems alongside humans. Also, the multi-agent self-play policies are more robust than those trained independently, suggesting that training in competitive environments is not only key to winning races but also to learning safer, more reliable autonomy for real-world multi-robot systems. Kudos to Ismail Geles, Leonard Bauersfeld, Markus Wulfmeier! Ismail Geles Leonard Bauersfeld Markus Wulfmeier European Research Council (ERC) UZH IfI University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub Swiss Robotics NCCR Robotics

Davide Scaramuzza

14,392 views • 24 days ago

Can an inexpensive, off-the-shelf IMU be the only sensor to estimate the full state (position, velocity, orientation) of a quadrotor flying through a track at high speed and even be on-pair with vision-based localization? The answer is yes, within certain limitations! In this #RAL2023 paper, we propose a learning-based odometry algorithm that couples a model-based filter driven by the inertial measurements with a learning-based module with access to the control commands. Our system outperforms by a large margin the state-of-the-art visual-inertial odometry (#VIO) algorithms and the state-of-the-art learned-inertial odometry algorithm, #TLIO, for the task of drone racing. Additionally, we show that our system is as accurate as a VIO algorithm that uses a camera to localize to a known map of the racing track. The main limitation of our approach is that it cannot generalize to trajectories that have not been seen at training time. However, in drone racing competitions, the track is known beforehand. Human pilots spend hours or even days of practice on the race track before the competition. Similarly, our system can be trained with the data collected during practice time and deployed during the competition. Future work will investigate how to generalize to trajectories not seen at training time. The code is released! Paper: Video: Code: Kudos to Giovanni Cioffi Leonard Bauersfeld Elia Kaufmann European Research Council (ERC) University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub NCCR Robotics Aerial Core #RAL2023 #IROS2023 #SLAM
0:31

Can an inexpensive, off-the-shelf IMU be the only sensor to estimate the full state (position, velocity, orientation) of a quadrotor flying through a track at high speed and even be on-pair with vision-based localization? The answer is yes, within certain limitations! In this #RAL2023 paper, we propose a learning-based odometry algorithm that couples a model-based filter driven by the inertial measurements with a learning-based module with access to the control commands. Our system outperforms by a large margin the state-of-the-art visual-inertial odometry (#VIO) algorithms and the state-of-the-art learned-inertial odometry algorithm, #TLIO, for the task of drone racing. Additionally, we show that our system is as accurate as a VIO algorithm that uses a camera to localize to a known map of the racing track. The main limitation of our approach is that it cannot generalize to trajectories that have not been seen at training time. However, in drone racing competitions, the track is known beforehand. Human pilots spend hours or even days of practice on the race track before the competition. Similarly, our system can be trained with the data collected during practice time and deployed during the competition. Future work will investigate how to generalize to trajectories not seen at training time. The code is released! Paper: Video: Code: Kudos to Giovanni Cioffi Leonard Bauersfeld Elia Kaufmann European Research Council (ERC) University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub NCCR Robotics Aerial Core #RAL2023 #IROS2023 #SLAM

Davide Scaramuzza

37,049 views • 2 years ago

We are excited to share our work “Event-Aided Sharp Radiance Field Reconstruction for Fast-Flying Drones” published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), which tackles sharp radiance field reconstruction under agile drone motion, where RGB frames are heavily motion-blurred and pose priors become unreliable! 4 years in the making! Code & dataset released! PDF: Code & Dataset: Full Narrated Video: High-speed flight is essential for time- and battery-constrained missions (e.g., inspection, exploration, search & rescue). However, fast motion corrupts visual data with severe motion blur and introduces drift/noise in visual-inertial odometry, making NeRF-based 3D reconstruction particularly brittle. We propose a unified framework that leverages asynchronous #EventCamera streams together with motion-blurred frames to reconstruct high-fidelity radiance fields from agile drone flights. Our key idea is to embed event-image fusion directly into radiance field optimization while jointly refining a shared, continuous-time camera trajectory initialized from event-based VIO. This enables us to recover sharp radiance fields and accurate trajectories without ground-truth supervision during training. We validate our method on synthetic data and on real sequences captured by a drone flying up to 2 m/s. Despite severe blur and noisy pose priors, our method preserves fine scene details and achieves a performance gain of over 50% on real-world data compared to state-of-the-art methods. Kudos to Rong Zou and Marco Cannici! Marco Cannici Reference: Rong Zou*, Marco Cannici*, Davide Scaramuzza Event-Aided Sharp Radiance Field Reconstruction for Fast-Flying Drones IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2026 NCCR Robotics European Research Council (ERC) AUTOASSESS UZH IfI University of Zurich UZH Science Prophesee SynSense UZH Space Hub
1:02

We are excited to share our work “Event-Aided Sharp Radiance Field Reconstruction for Fast-Flying Drones” published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), which tackles sharp radiance field reconstruction under agile drone motion, where RGB frames are heavily motion-blurred and pose priors become unreliable! 4 years in the making! Code & dataset released! PDF: Code & Dataset: Full Narrated Video: High-speed flight is essential for time- and battery-constrained missions (e.g., inspection, exploration, search & rescue). However, fast motion corrupts visual data with severe motion blur and introduces drift/noise in visual-inertial odometry, making NeRF-based 3D reconstruction particularly brittle. We propose a unified framework that leverages asynchronous #EventCamera streams together with motion-blurred frames to reconstruct high-fidelity radiance fields from agile drone flights. Our key idea is to embed event-image fusion directly into radiance field optimization while jointly refining a shared, continuous-time camera trajectory initialized from event-based VIO. This enables us to recover sharp radiance fields and accurate trajectories without ground-truth supervision during training. We validate our method on synthetic data and on real sequences captured by a drone flying up to 2 m/s. Despite severe blur and noisy pose priors, our method preserves fine scene details and achieves a performance gain of over 50% on real-world data compared to state-of-the-art methods. Kudos to Rong Zou and Marco Cannici! Marco Cannici Reference: Rong Zou*, Marco Cannici*, Davide Scaramuzza Event-Aided Sharp Radiance Field Reconstruction for Fast-Flying Drones IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2026 NCCR Robotics European Research Council (ERC) AUTOASSESS UZH IfI University of Zurich UZH Science Prophesee SynSense UZH Space Hub

Davide Scaramuzza

11,902 views • 3 months ago

We are excited to share our #CORL2024 paper on learning quadrotor obstacle avoidance from the visual stream of a single #eventcamera! Trained entirely in simulation! We demonstrate obstacle avoidance both in the dark and in a forest up to 5m/s. PDF: Video: Project page: Event cameras are sensors that output per-pixel-level intensity changes at microsecond latency resolution; they feature nearly zero motion blur and high dynamic range but produce a very large volume of events under significant ego-motion and further lack a high-fidelity continuous-time sensor model in simulation, making direct #sim2real transfer not possible. By leveraging depth prediction as a pretext task, we pre-train a reactive obstacle avoidance policy with “approximated” simulated events and then fine-tune the perception component with limited events-and-depth real-world data. This technique bridges the sim2real gap for #eventcameras! As at the current state, there is no continuous-time sensor model for event cameras, we hope that this work can finally spur future research leveraging simulation for training event-vision-based policies to create faster, agile robots! Kudos to Anish Bhattacharya, @marcocannic, Vijay Kumar Nikolai Matni UZH Science University of Zurich UZH Space Hub UZH IfI European Research Council (ERC) GRASP Laboratory Penn Engineering
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We are excited to share our #CORL2024 paper on learning quadrotor obstacle avoidance from the visual stream of a single #eventcamera! Trained entirely in simulation! We demonstrate obstacle avoidance both in the dark and in a forest up to 5m/s. PDF: Video: Project page: Event cameras are sensors that output per-pixel-level intensity changes at microsecond latency resolution; they feature nearly zero motion blur and high dynamic range but produce a very large volume of events under significant ego-motion and further lack a high-fidelity continuous-time sensor model in simulation, making direct #sim2real transfer not possible. By leveraging depth prediction as a pretext task, we pre-train a reactive obstacle avoidance policy with “approximated” simulated events and then fine-tune the perception component with limited events-and-depth real-world data. This technique bridges the sim2real gap for #eventcameras! As at the current state, there is no continuous-time sensor model for event cameras, we hope that this work can finally spur future research leveraging simulation for training event-vision-based policies to create faster, agile robots! Kudos to Anish Bhattacharya, @marcocannic, Vijay Kumar Nikolai Matni UZH Science University of Zurich UZH Space Hub UZH IfI European Research Council (ERC) GRASP Laboratory Penn Engineering

Davide Scaramuzza

17,163 views • 1 year ago

Testing robot policies on hardware is slow, expensive and hard to scale. World models offer a promising path to accelerating robot policy development. We're sharing new research from the Runway Robotics team, in which we simulated 8 robot policies inside our General World Model and found 0.95 correlation with real-world results. Those early results point to world model simulation as a practical substitute for hardware evaluation, comparing favorably to existing real-to-sim approaches. Learn more at the link below.
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Testing robot policies on hardware is slow, expensive and hard to scale. World models offer a promising path to accelerating robot policy development. We're sharing new research from the Runway Robotics team, in which we simulated 8 robot policies inside our General World Model and found 0.95 correlation with real-world results. Those early results point to world model simulation as a practical substitute for hardware evaluation, comparing favorably to existing real-to-sim approaches. Learn more at the link below.

Runway

13,464 views • 3 months ago

Glad that our work “Inference-Time Enhancement of Generative Robot Policies via Predictive World Modeling”, led by Han Qi, has been accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters! 🎉 We propose Generative Predictive Control (GPC): sample action proposals from a pretrained diffusion policy (“look back”), roll them out with a diffusion-based action-conditioned video world model (“look forward”), then rank or optimize the actions using either a learned reward model or VLM preferences. Conceptually, this is trajectory optimization / MPC with hybrid sampling + gradient optimization, interpreted through modern diffusion priors and video world models. Interestingly, we first posted the paper on arXiv in Feb 2025, when action-conditioned video world models for planning were still rare—now this direction is rapidly gaining traction. Still many open questions, e.g., • how to avoid local minima in planning • what representations work best for world models • how to balance physics priors vs. data-driven learning Paper:
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Glad that our work “Inference-Time Enhancement of Generative Robot Policies via Predictive World Modeling”, led by Han Qi, has been accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters! 🎉 We propose Generative Predictive Control (GPC): sample action proposals from a pretrained diffusion policy (“look back”), roll them out with a diffusion-based action-conditioned video world model (“look forward”), then rank or optimize the actions using either a learned reward model or VLM preferences. Conceptually, this is trajectory optimization / MPC with hybrid sampling + gradient optimization, interpreted through modern diffusion priors and video world models. Interestingly, we first posted the paper on arXiv in Feb 2025, when action-conditioned video world models for planning were still rare—now this direction is rapidly gaining traction. Still many open questions, e.g., • how to avoid local minima in planning • what representations work best for world models • how to balance physics priors vs. data-driven learning Paper:

Heng Yang

18,968 views • 3 months ago

Zelensky: This is an iPad with software that lets us control our security in real time. It lets us see the front line in Ukraine and even every enemy killed, with video proof. Right now, 90% of Russian losses on the front are caused by our drones. The iPad also shows every strike in our skies, our sea area, and our long-range strikes against Russia. It gives us real-time control over people’s safety, as well as our infrastructure and energy sector. The system lets us analyze each attack and our defense response as a whole in real time. We see what is happening in the sky and what resources are being used to protect us. It is a clear way to keep control and to adapt to real-time situations.
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Zelensky: This is an iPad with software that lets us control our security in real time. It lets us see the front line in Ukraine and even every enemy killed, with video proof. Right now, 90% of Russian losses on the front are caused by our drones. The iPad also shows every strike in our skies, our sea area, and our long-range strikes against Russia. It gives us real-time control over people’s safety, as well as our infrastructure and energy sector. The system lets us analyze each attack and our defense response as a whole in real time. We see what is happening in the sky and what resources are being used to protect us. It is a clear way to keep control and to adapt to real-time situations.

Clash Report

120,047 views • 3 months ago

BOOM! 💥 There it is, our flight termination system (FTS) in one of many tests to validate its performance and overall reliability for our Nova rocket program. (🔊 Sound on) The FTS is a component of Nova's Autonomous Flight Safety System (AFSS) that continuously monitors the vehicle’s trajectory against pre-defined safety limits and autonomously commands termination if needed.
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BOOM! 💥 There it is, our flight termination system (FTS) in one of many tests to validate its performance and overall reliability for our Nova rocket program. (🔊 Sound on) The FTS is a component of Nova's Autonomous Flight Safety System (AFSS) that continuously monitors the vehicle’s trajectory against pre-defined safety limits and autonomously commands termination if needed.

Stoke Space

64,889 views • 4 months ago

For more than nine months, our legislation creating a Department of Sustainable Delivery to improve e-bike road safety in our city has sat ignored by the New York City Council. We are calling on them to work with us to improve safety for all New Yorkers:
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For more than nine months, our legislation creating a Department of Sustainable Delivery to improve e-bike road safety in our city has sat ignored by the New York City Council. We are calling on them to work with us to improve safety for all New Yorkers:

Mayor Eric Adams

49,638 views • 1 year ago

The longer DHS goes without funding, the less time we have to prepare our nation for optimal safety and security at the FIFA World Cup and America’s 250th birthday. This Democrat shutdown impedes DHS’s ability to keep Americans safe. Democrats must end this shutdown now and let DHS get back to our mission of protecting the Homeland.
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The longer DHS goes without funding, the less time we have to prepare our nation for optimal safety and security at the FIFA World Cup and America’s 250th birthday. This Democrat shutdown impedes DHS’s ability to keep Americans safe. Democrats must end this shutdown now and let DHS get back to our mission of protecting the Homeland.

Homeland Security

48,790 views • 3 months ago

Safety is always our first priority, and ensuring flight safety was the reason for this morning’s ground stop while the affected systems were restored and checked. As normal flight operations have resumed, FAA continues to assess the causes of the outage.
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Safety is always our first priority, and ensuring flight safety was the reason for this morning’s ground stop while the affected systems were restored and checked. As normal flight operations have resumed, FAA continues to assess the causes of the outage.

Secretary Pete Buttigieg

260,379 views • 3 years ago