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Today’s #bondwithmol class experiment: Synthesis of nylon-6,10 doped with fluorescein. Performed with maruansalim. CHE102 UZH Chemistry UZH Science Universität Zürich University of Zurich #teaching #chemistry #learning #student JuricekLab

Michal Juricek

4,442 subscribers

10,834 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren •via X (Twitter)

Bildung #bondwithmol #teaching #chemistry #learning #student

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6 Kommentare

Profilbild von Kyle Grice

Kyle Gricevor 2 Jahren

@maruan_salim @UZH_Chemistry @UZH_Science @UZH_ch @UZH_en @JuricekLab Ok, this a is great way to jazz up the nylon synthesis experiment!

Profilbild von Shilong Su

Shilong Suvor 2 Jahren

@maruan_salim @UZH_Chemistry @UZH_Science @UZH_ch @UZH_en @JuricekLab Good experiment of interfacial polymerization. I remember we compared who can get the longest fiber from it. Can reach longer than 3 m

Profilbild von Shilong Su

Shilong Suvor 2 Jahren

@maruan_salim @UZH_Chemistry @UZH_Science @UZH_ch @UZH_en @JuricekLab Incorporation of fluorescein is a good idea of improvement from the original ones

Profilbild von Engr. Ihsan

Engr. Ihsanvor 2 Jahren

@maruan_salim @UZH_Chemistry @UZH_Science @UZH_ch @UZH_en @JuricekLab Wonderful 😍

Profilbild von FreeRadical

FreeRadicalvor 2 Jahren

@maruan_salim @UZH_Chemistry @UZH_Science @UZH_ch @UZH_en @JuricekLab Chemistry is amazing 😂

Profilbild von #ark

#arkvor 2 Jahren

@maruan_salim @UZH_Chemistry @UZH_Science @UZH_ch @UZH_en @JuricekLab Whats the combination of the two

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37,061 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren

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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

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14,742 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

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 to drive or fly fast and safe? We enhance our former MPCC by incorporating spatial constraints that reliably prevent obstacle collisions, allowing planning the fastest trajectory within these safety limits. To improve performance, we leverage real-world data to refine the dynamic model. Our approach is the first to achieve a 100% success rate in real-world experiments. This safety benefit comes without compromising performance, as our method achieves lap times comparable to the best-performing state-based #ReinforcementLearning (RL) policies. Reference M. Krinner, A. Romero, L. Bauersfeld, M. Zeilinger, A. Carron, D. Scaramuzza, "MPCC++: Model Predictive Contouring Control for Time-Optimal Flight with Safety Constraints" Robotics, Science and Systems, 2024 PDF: Video: Kudos to Maria Krinner, Angel Romero Aguilar, Leonard Bauersfeld, Melanie Zeilinger, Andrea Carron! Ángel Romero Leonard Bauersfeld University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub AUTOASSESS European Research Council (ERC) #MPC #ModelPredictiveControl

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 to drive or fly fast and safe? We enhance our former MPCC by incorporating spatial constraints that reliably prevent obstacle collisions, allowing planning the fastest trajectory within these safety limits. To improve performance, we leverage real-world data to refine the dynamic model. Our approach is the first to achieve a 100% success rate in real-world experiments. This safety benefit comes without compromising performance, as our method achieves lap times comparable to the best-performing state-based #ReinforcementLearning (RL) policies. Reference M. Krinner, A. Romero, L. Bauersfeld, M. Zeilinger, A. Carron, D. Scaramuzza, "MPCC++: Model Predictive Contouring Control for Time-Optimal Flight with Safety Constraints" Robotics, Science and Systems, 2024 PDF: Video: Kudos to Maria Krinner, Angel Romero Aguilar, Leonard Bauersfeld, Melanie Zeilinger, Andrea Carron! Ángel Romero Leonard Bauersfeld University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub AUTOASSESS European Research Council (ERC) #MPC #ModelPredictiveControl

Davide Scaramuzza

17,933 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

On the third day of the 12 Day War, Iran directly struck the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot with two ballistic missiles in response to the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. The missiles destroyed a facility dedicated to housing chemistry and material science labs that was scheduled to open that year and another building devoted to life and computational sciences. 90% of the structures at the institute were damaged, including 22 labs and over 100 university buildings at an estimated overall cost of $600 million [06-15-2025]

On the third day of the 12 Day War, Iran directly struck the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot with two ballistic missiles in response to the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. The missiles destroyed a facility dedicated to housing chemistry and material science labs that was scheduled to open that year and another building devoted to life and computational sciences. 90% of the structures at the institute were damaged, including 22 labs and over 100 university buildings at an estimated overall cost of $600 million [06-15-2025]

barry with the NED

61,911 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

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

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

12,028 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

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

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

27,351 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

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)

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

28,002 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Pope Leo XIV made a historic visit to Rome's La Sapienza University—without the turmoil that forced Benedict XVI to cancel his 2008 address. That moment revealed a deeper clash between faith and secular academia, one Benedict sought to engage through dialogue on truth, reason, and the limits of science. La Sapienza is considered to be the largest university in Europe by student population, with around 110,000-120,000+ students. Today’s visit included prayer in the chapel, an address in the Aula Magna, a gift exchange and a greeting of students.

Pope Leo XIV made a historic visit to Rome's La Sapienza University—without the turmoil that forced Benedict XVI to cancel his 2008 address. That moment revealed a deeper clash between faith and secular academia, one Benedict sought to engage through dialogue on truth, reason, and the limits of science. La Sapienza is considered to be the largest university in Europe by student population, with around 110,000-120,000+ students. Today’s visit included prayer in the chapel, an address in the Aula Magna, a gift exchange and a greeting of students.

EWTN Vatican

17,889 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten