Video wird geladen...

Video konnte nicht geladen werden

Zur Startseite

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...

davsca1's profile picture

Davide Scaramuzza

18,846 subscribers

28,002 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren •via X (Twitter)

Wissenschaft & TechnologieBildungNachrichten & Politik#RSS2024
LIVE

Anya Rossi• Live Now

Private livecam show

5 Kommentare

Profilbild von sam cash 🌎
sam cash 🌎vor 2 Jahren

Impressive

Profilbild von Kaltoro ⚡️
Kaltoro ⚡️vor 2 Jahren

The drones are gonna kill us all aren't they? Yes, yes they are.

Profilbild von Sabeer Saeed
Sabeer Saeedvor 2 Jahren

Super Outstanding..

Profilbild von Micah Corah
Micah Corahvor 2 Jahren

What exactly does "no IMU" constitute here? Is there a low level flight controller that relies on an IMU, or do you mean there is no IMU entirely?

Profilbild von iandanforth 🦋 @iandanforth.bsky.social
iandanforth 🦋 @iandanforth.bsky.socialvor 2 Jahren

Would it be even better if you gave it access to IMU data?

Ähnliche Videos

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

16,089 Aufrufe • vor 5 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
0:47

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

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

37,061 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren

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

13,860 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

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

19,283 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

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

50,360 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

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

14,742 Aufrufe • vor 4 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
1:46

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

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)
1:26

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

34,920 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

End-to-end neural networks racing drones in Abu Dhabi! 🚁 Check out the drone racing team from Delft University of Technology! A completely end-to-end neural network solution, from pixels to direct motor commands. No Kalman filters. No computer vision feature detectors. Just neurons flying the drone. The challenge is extreme. These drones fly at high speeds and need split-second decisions with minimal onboard resources: a single rolling-shutter camera and an IMU. Their approach is called SkyDreamer, based on the Dreamer-v3 reinforcement learning algorithm. First, a world model is trained in simulation. Then, the neural network learns how to fly in its dreams through reinforcement learning. The network's internal state can be read out to see where it thinks it is on the track or how fast it's going. Even better, the drone estimates some of its own body characteristics during flight, like the camera angle relative to the body, eliminating time-consuming manual calibration. The system uses only a single camera and the gyros from the IMU, ignoring the accelerometers, just like human FPV pilots do. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →
1:01

End-to-end neural networks racing drones in Abu Dhabi! 🚁 Check out the drone racing team from Delft University of Technology! A completely end-to-end neural network solution, from pixels to direct motor commands. No Kalman filters. No computer vision feature detectors. Just neurons flying the drone. The challenge is extreme. These drones fly at high speeds and need split-second decisions with minimal onboard resources: a single rolling-shutter camera and an IMU. Their approach is called SkyDreamer, based on the Dreamer-v3 reinforcement learning algorithm. First, a world model is trained in simulation. Then, the neural network learns how to fly in its dreams through reinforcement learning. The network's internal state can be read out to see where it thinks it is on the track or how fast it's going. Even better, the drone estimates some of its own body characteristics during flight, like the camera angle relative to the body, eliminating time-consuming manual calibration. The system uses only a single camera and the gyros from the IMU, ignoring the accelerometers, just like human FPV pilots do. ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Lukas Ziegler

207,500 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

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
1:25

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

17,219 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

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

12,028 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

Physics-based Motion Retargeting from Sparse Inputs paper page: Avatars are important to create interactive and immersive experiences in virtual worlds. One challenge in animating these characters to mimic a user's motion is that commercial AR/VR products consist only of a headset and controllers, providing very limited sensor data of the user's pose. Another challenge is that an avatar might have a different skeleton structure than a human and the mapping between them is unclear. In this work we address both of these challenges. We introduce a method to retarget motions in real-time from sparse human sensor data to characters of various morphologies. Our method uses reinforcement learning to train a policy to control characters in a physics simulator. We only require human motion capture data for training, without relying on artist-generated animations for each avatar. This allows us to use large motion capture datasets to train general policies that can track unseen users from real and sparse data in real-time. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on three characters with different skeleton structure: a dinosaur, a mouse-like creature and a human. We show that the avatar poses often match the user surprisingly well, despite having no sensor information of the lower body available. We discuss and ablate the important components in our framework, specifically the kinematic retargeting step, the imitation, contact and action reward as well as our asymmetric actor-critic observations. We further explore the robustness of our method in a variety of settings including unbalancing, dancing and sports motions.
7:12

Physics-based Motion Retargeting from Sparse Inputs paper page: Avatars are important to create interactive and immersive experiences in virtual worlds. One challenge in animating these characters to mimic a user's motion is that commercial AR/VR products consist only of a headset and controllers, providing very limited sensor data of the user's pose. Another challenge is that an avatar might have a different skeleton structure than a human and the mapping between them is unclear. In this work we address both of these challenges. We introduce a method to retarget motions in real-time from sparse human sensor data to characters of various morphologies. Our method uses reinforcement learning to train a policy to control characters in a physics simulator. We only require human motion capture data for training, without relying on artist-generated animations for each avatar. This allows us to use large motion capture datasets to train general policies that can track unseen users from real and sparse data in real-time. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on three characters with different skeleton structure: a dinosaur, a mouse-like creature and a human. We show that the avatar poses often match the user surprisingly well, despite having no sensor information of the lower body available. We discuss and ablate the important components in our framework, specifically the kinematic retargeting step, the imitation, contact and action reward as well as our asymmetric actor-critic observations. We further explore the robustness of our method in a variety of settings including unbalancing, dancing and sports motions.

AK

106,527 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren

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

15,572 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Synchronize Dual Hands for Physics-Based Dexterous Guitar Playing discuss: We present a novel approach to synthesize dexterous motions for physically simulated hands in tasks that require coordination between the control of two hands with high temporal precision. Instead of directly learning a joint policy to control two hands, our approach performs bimanual control through cooperative learning where each hand is treated as an individual agent. The individual policies for each hand are first trained separately, and then synchronized through latent space manipulation in a centralized environment to serve as a joint policy for two-hand control. By doing so, we avoid directly performing policy learning in the joint state-action space of two hands with higher dimensions, greatly improving the overall training efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in the challenging guitar-playing task. The virtual guitarist trained by our approach can synthesize motions from unstructured reference data of general guitar-playing practice motions, and accurately play diverse rhythms with complex chord pressing and string picking patterns based on the input guitar tabs that do not exist in the references. Along with this paper, we provide the motion capture data that we collected as the reference for policy training.
6:21

Synchronize Dual Hands for Physics-Based Dexterous Guitar Playing discuss: We present a novel approach to synthesize dexterous motions for physically simulated hands in tasks that require coordination between the control of two hands with high temporal precision. Instead of directly learning a joint policy to control two hands, our approach performs bimanual control through cooperative learning where each hand is treated as an individual agent. The individual policies for each hand are first trained separately, and then synchronized through latent space manipulation in a centralized environment to serve as a joint policy for two-hand control. By doing so, we avoid directly performing policy learning in the joint state-action space of two hands with higher dimensions, greatly improving the overall training efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in the challenging guitar-playing task. The virtual guitarist trained by our approach can synthesize motions from unstructured reference data of general guitar-playing practice motions, and accurately play diverse rhythms with complex chord pressing and string picking patterns based on the input guitar tabs that do not exist in the references. Along with this paper, we provide the motion capture data that we collected as the reference for policy training.

AK

26,917 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Differentiable Blocks World: Qualitative 3D Decomposition by Rendering Primitives paper page: Given a set of calibrated images of a scene, we present an approach that produces a simple, compact, and actionable 3D world representation by means of 3D primitives. While many approaches focus on recovering high-fidelity 3D scenes, we focus on parsing a scene into mid-level 3D representations made of a small set of textured primitives. Such representations are interpretable, easy to manipulate and suited for physics-based simulations. Moreover, unlike existing primitive decomposition methods that rely on 3D input data, our approach operates directly on images through differentiable rendering. Specifically, we model primitives as textured superquadric meshes and optimize their parameters from scratch with an image rendering loss. We highlight the importance of modeling transparency for each primitive, which is critical for optimization and also enables handling varying numbers of primitives. We show that the resulting textured primitives faithfully reconstruct the input images and accurately model the visible 3D points, while providing amodal shape completions of unseen object regions. We compare our approach to the state of the art on diverse scenes from DTU, and demonstrate its robustness on real-life captures from BlendedMVS and Nerfstudio. We also showcase how our results can be used to effortlessly edit a scene or perform physical simulations.
0:27

Differentiable Blocks World: Qualitative 3D Decomposition by Rendering Primitives paper page: Given a set of calibrated images of a scene, we present an approach that produces a simple, compact, and actionable 3D world representation by means of 3D primitives. While many approaches focus on recovering high-fidelity 3D scenes, we focus on parsing a scene into mid-level 3D representations made of a small set of textured primitives. Such representations are interpretable, easy to manipulate and suited for physics-based simulations. Moreover, unlike existing primitive decomposition methods that rely on 3D input data, our approach operates directly on images through differentiable rendering. Specifically, we model primitives as textured superquadric meshes and optimize their parameters from scratch with an image rendering loss. We highlight the importance of modeling transparency for each primitive, which is critical for optimization and also enables handling varying numbers of primitives. We show that the resulting textured primitives faithfully reconstruct the input images and accurately model the visible 3D points, while providing amodal shape completions of unseen object regions. We compare our approach to the state of the art on diverse scenes from DTU, and demonstrate its robustness on real-life captures from BlendedMVS and Nerfstudio. We also showcase how our results can be used to effortlessly edit a scene or perform physical simulations.

AK

38,571 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren

Today, 14th April 2025, we have just concluded an expanded security council meeting comprising security chiefs and local government chairmen, convened in response to the attack that came to our attention early this morning. At around midnight, into the early hours of today, over a hundred bandits descended on one of the communities in Bassa Local Government Area, leaving behind a trail of destruction numerous lives lost and several houses destroyed. We have received detailed briefings from the heads of the various security agencies regarding the incident. We are working diligently to establish exactly what happened and why, so that we can respond appropriately and prevent such incidents in the future. At the moment, the situation in the area is relatively calm. We have engaged with the affected community, urging the people to remain calm and avoid any retaliatory actions that could further escalate tensions. We are grateful that the youths of the community listened to our appeal. We are currently considering far-reaching decisions aimed at preventing future occurrences. The details of some of these decisions will be shared during my broadcast tomorrow. In the meantime, I want to reassure the people of Plateau State that we are firmly in control of the situation, and we will go to any length necessary to prevent a recurrence. I also want to encourage citizens across the state: if you come across any intelligence no matter how insignificant it may seem please report it to the authorities. We are committed to protecting the sources of information, ensuring that no life is at jeopardy. We recognize that without timely and sufficient intelligence, we cannot respond as effectively as needed. By God’s grace, we are working to strengthen our capacity for intelligence gathering. Meanwhile , we continue to pray that God will comfort the families of those who lost their lives in this tragic incident.
3:09

Today, 14th April 2025, we have just concluded an expanded security council meeting comprising security chiefs and local government chairmen, convened in response to the attack that came to our attention early this morning. At around midnight, into the early hours of today, over a hundred bandits descended on one of the communities in Bassa Local Government Area, leaving behind a trail of destruction numerous lives lost and several houses destroyed. We have received detailed briefings from the heads of the various security agencies regarding the incident. We are working diligently to establish exactly what happened and why, so that we can respond appropriately and prevent such incidents in the future. At the moment, the situation in the area is relatively calm. We have engaged with the affected community, urging the people to remain calm and avoid any retaliatory actions that could further escalate tensions. We are grateful that the youths of the community listened to our appeal. We are currently considering far-reaching decisions aimed at preventing future occurrences. The details of some of these decisions will be shared during my broadcast tomorrow. In the meantime, I want to reassure the people of Plateau State that we are firmly in control of the situation, and we will go to any length necessary to prevent a recurrence. I also want to encourage citizens across the state: if you come across any intelligence no matter how insignificant it may seem please report it to the authorities. We are committed to protecting the sources of information, ensuring that no life is at jeopardy. We recognize that without timely and sufficient intelligence, we cannot respond as effectively as needed. By God’s grace, we are working to strengthen our capacity for intelligence gathering. Meanwhile , we continue to pray that God will comfort the families of those who lost their lives in this tragic incident.

Caleb Mutfwang

47,463 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Robora x Lemorele We are excited to announce the integration of the Robora P300 (R) model. An exclusive model developed in partnership with Lemorele, features a custom Robora-exclusive SKU and hardware configuration designed to support high-performance, wireless video streaming for AI training and perception. We will integrate this specialized unit into our VLA Module. The Robora P300 (R) enables seamless, real-time capture of high-definition HDMI video from external cameras, allowing users to wirelessly feed visual data directly into the VLA training pipeline. This enhances capabilities such as multi-view learning, remote annotation, and real-world AI fine-tuning, all without requiring tethered camera setups. While the full Robora robotics platform is still in development, users will be able to use the Robora P300 (R) hardware with their existing iOS or Android devices, enabling them to begin collecting and streaming visual data for VLA from mobile platforms. As part of our commitment to the Robora community, we will be offering exclusive giveaways of the Robora P300 (R) hardware to token holders, giving early supporters the opportunity to contribute directly to Robora’s growing AI training ecosystem and to gain early access to the tools that power the future of robotics and intelligent vision.
0:58

Robora x Lemorele We are excited to announce the integration of the Robora P300 (R) model. An exclusive model developed in partnership with Lemorele, features a custom Robora-exclusive SKU and hardware configuration designed to support high-performance, wireless video streaming for AI training and perception. We will integrate this specialized unit into our VLA Module. The Robora P300 (R) enables seamless, real-time capture of high-definition HDMI video from external cameras, allowing users to wirelessly feed visual data directly into the VLA training pipeline. This enhances capabilities such as multi-view learning, remote annotation, and real-world AI fine-tuning, all without requiring tethered camera setups. While the full Robora robotics platform is still in development, users will be able to use the Robora P300 (R) hardware with their existing iOS or Android devices, enabling them to begin collecting and streaming visual data for VLA from mobile platforms. As part of our commitment to the Robora community, we will be offering exclusive giveaways of the Robora P300 (R) hardware to token holders, giving early supporters the opportunity to contribute directly to Robora’s growing AI training ecosystem and to gain early access to the tools that power the future of robotics and intelligent vision.

Robora

19,276 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

I am happy to be finally able to post what I was able to build over the last few weeks. A full real-time high-frequency state estimation and mapping algorithm completely written line by line from scratch in Rust, which can be used by robots to navigate and reason within the 3D world also in complicated scenarios. TBH this took me longer than expected (which was still super fast :D) but you need to get a lot right: From the sensors over the drivers to their respective estimation pipeline and then fusing everything together - a covariance nightmare - and something that can be refined over years to come (currently using Fisher Information from the real measurements). What you see here is not the output of some structure from motion or Gaussian splatting, these are the points of a tight mesh (high res for the video) that a robot can use in real time to plan a path using any open-source planner. The flight you experience through the world is the actual state estimate of the scanner which is published at IMU rate. Yes, currently we have some artefacts of filtered-out humans (GDPR compliant of course :) ) and moving cars and there is still some calibration that could be improved. Offline refinement with SFM and Gaussian splats is possible as well but currently not on the road map. What is on the road map is an exciting step of now being able to collect data from customers at construction sites and in warehouses (currently handheld in the near future with a robot). This data can then be used by our physical agents to reason within this world and automate any customer’s task related to 3D data. If you have anyone who wastes time manually looking 👀 through 3D data, or cannot collect enough 3D data and interpret: Tell me how to reach them!
1:15

I am happy to be finally able to post what I was able to build over the last few weeks. A full real-time high-frequency state estimation and mapping algorithm completely written line by line from scratch in Rust, which can be used by robots to navigate and reason within the 3D world also in complicated scenarios. TBH this took me longer than expected (which was still super fast :D) but you need to get a lot right: From the sensors over the drivers to their respective estimation pipeline and then fusing everything together - a covariance nightmare - and something that can be refined over years to come (currently using Fisher Information from the real measurements). What you see here is not the output of some structure from motion or Gaussian splatting, these are the points of a tight mesh (high res for the video) that a robot can use in real time to plan a path using any open-source planner. The flight you experience through the world is the actual state estimate of the scanner which is published at IMU rate. Yes, currently we have some artefacts of filtered-out humans (GDPR compliant of course :) ) and moving cars and there is still some calibration that could be improved. Offline refinement with SFM and Gaussian splats is possible as well but currently not on the road map. What is on the road map is an exciting step of now being able to collect data from customers at construction sites and in warehouses (currently handheld in the near future with a robot). This data can then be used by our physical agents to reason within this world and automate any customer’s task related to 3D data. If you have anyone who wastes time manually looking 👀 through 3D data, or cannot collect enough 3D data and interpret: Tell me how to reach them!

Benedikt Seidel

16,671 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten