Position:	Professor
Email:	sdavide@ifi.uzh.ch
Work phone:
Home page:	http://direct:http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/people_scaramuzza.html

Davide Scaramuzza is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at the University of Zurich. He did his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, and was a visiting professor at Stanford University. His research focuses on autonomous, agile navigation of micro drones using standard and event-based cameras. He pioneered autonomous, vision-based navigation of micro drones, which inspired the navigation algorithm of the NASA Mars helicopter and many drone companies. In 2022, his team demonstrated that an AI-powered drone could outperform the world champions of drone racing, a result published in Nature and featured on the magazine cover. His result marks the first time an AI defeated a human in the physical world (previous AI wins against humans at chess, Go, StanrCraft, and Gran Turismo were done on board games or video games). His research contributed significantly to visual-inertial state estimation, vision-based agile navigation of microdrones, and low-latency, robust perception with event cameras. His results have been transferred to many products, from drones to automobiles, cameras, AR/VR headsets, and mobile devices. He counts several entrepreneurial achievements: In 2015, he co-founded Zurich-Eye, which became Facebook-Meta Zurich and developed the world-leading virtual-reality headset Meta Quest. In 2020, he co-founded SUIND, which builds autonomous drones for precision agriculture. For his research contributions and tech transfer, he has won many awards, including a Kiyo-Tomiyasu IEEE Technical Field Award (won only by two other roboticists in the 20 years of existence of this award), an IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, a European Research Council Consolidator Grant, and many paper awards, including the 2023 IROS Best Paper Award, the 2022 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award, and the 2018 IEEE Transactions on Robotics Best Paper Award. He co-authored the book "Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots," published by MIT Press, which has sold over 10 thousand copies worldwide and is among the most used textbooks for teaching mobile robotics. He has been consulting the United Nations on disaster response, the Fukushima Action Plan, disarmament, and AI for good. Many aspects of his research have been featured in the media, such as The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and Forbes.