Biography

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Born in Terni, Italy, in 1980, Davide received his Master's degree (2004) in Electronics and Information Engineering (Summa cum Laude and Dignity of Printing) at the University of Perugia, Italy. His Master's thesis won the Aica-Federcomin Award (Federcomin is a sector of Confindustria, the confederation of the Italian industries), the most prestigious Italian prize for Master's theses in the field of Information and Communication Technology. His advisors were Prof. Paolo Valigi and Dr. Stefano Pagnottelli, from the University of Perugia.

After completing his Master's thesis, between October 2004 to February 2005, he did an internship at the EPFL of Lausanne, Switzerland. Afterwards, he started his PhD studies at the Autonomous Systems Lab of EPFL with Prof. Roland Siegwart. In July 2006, the Autonomous Systems Lab was moved to ETH Zurich. In February 2008, he received his PhD in Computer Vision and Robotics at ETH Zurich with his thesis: Omnidirectional vision: from calibration to robot motion estimation. His PhD advisor was Prof. Roland Siegwart and his committee members were Prof. Patrick Rives (INRIA Sophia Antipolis) and Prof. Luc Van Gool (ETH Zurich). His PhD thesis won the Robotdalen Scientific Award, which is the most prestigious award for PhD theses in the field of Robotics and Automation. The prize was supported by the European Union, the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, ABB, Volvo, and several other industries.

As of February 2008, he became a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous Systems Lab of Professor Siegwart at ETH Zurich. In January 2009, he became leader and project manager of the European project sFly. He will lead this project until its end in December 2011. From 2008 to 2010, he was lecturer of the Autonomous Mobile Robots Masters course. In 2009, he led a group of Bachelor and PhD students to participate in the European Micro Aerial Competition. They won the 2nd place with the first purely vision based autonomous helicopter.

In November 2009, he was invited reseracher at the Industrial Council for Scientific Research in Pretoria, South Africa, for two months. There, he worked at the Department of Modeling and Digital Sciences, MIAS Lab (Mobile Intelligent Autonomous Systems) under the direction of Dr. Simukai Utete.

In July 2009, Davide coauthored the book "Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots," 2nd edition, MIT Press, along with Roland Siegwart and Illah Nourbakhsh. In November 2010, after one year of intense writing and literature research, the book was submitted to MIT Press and appeared in bookstores in February 2011.

In January 2011, Davide moved to the GRASP Lab of the University of Pennsylvania for a second postdoc under the direction of Prof. Vijay Kumar and Prof. Kostas Daniilidis.

In February 2012, he became Assistant Professor in Human Oriented Robotics at the University of Zurich where he heads the Robotics and Perception Lab.

Davide is also the author of the first Omnidirectional Camera Calibration Toolbox for MATLAB (online since 2006). So far, this toolbox has recorded more than 60,000 downloads, over 100 paper citations, and hundreds of acknowledgements by satisfied users from all over the world. It is currently used at NASA, PHILIPS, BOSCH, DAIMLER, and several companies like IDS Imaging, XSens, etc.

Between 2009 and 2010, he worked as a consultant of the ETH spin-off Dacuda, inventor of the world first scanner mouse, currently distributed by LG (watch promo video).

Davide is also a member of the IEEE community and IEEE Robotics Automation Society.

Awards

September 9, 2009,

Davide Scaramuzza wins the Robotdalen Scientific Award

Advanced algorithms give him 20,000 Euros in prize money!

Davide Scaramuzza won the Robotdalen Scientific Award 2009 (worldwide most prestigious scientific award for PhD theses in the field of Robotics and Automation) and received the prize sum of 20,000 Euros for his competition contribution: his doctoral thesis on "Omnidirectional Vision, from Calibration to Robot Motion Estimation". The prize ceremony took place on the annual conference Robotdalen Day in Vasteras, Sweden, at the presence of the County Governor and many industrial partners.

Robotdalen is an annual award that goes to a young scientist in the field of robotics. The award is supported by the European Union, Vinn

ova, ABB, Volvo, Atlas, Copco, ESAB, and many other companies.

Links

September 17, 2009

2nd place at the European Micro Aerial Vehicle competition with the first purely vision based autonomous helicopter

The European MAV competition, took place in Delft (Netherlands).

The competition consisted in having a small helicopter entering and exiting from small apartment in a fully autonomous manner.

My team, named ETH-Maverick, was the only autonomous team over the 8 participating teams. Furthermore, it was the only team using only a single camera to control the helicopter, whereas all the other teams used remote control.

The autonomy of the helicopter and the use of solely vision impressed the jury and gave us team the 2nd place. We missed the 1sr place because th

e size of the helicopter was a penalizing factor according to the rule used in the competition.

Links

30 November 2005

"AICA-FEDERCOMIN Award"

In June 2005 Davide won the first Italian national prize in the contest of AICA-FEDERCOMIN, as the best Master Thesis of the year in the field Information Communication Technology and received the prize sum of 5,000 Euros.

The prize was given by the former Italian Minister for the Innovation and Technologies Lucio Stanca.

FEDERCOMIN is the Federation of CONFINDUSTRIA, the Italian manufacturers' association for telecommunication, radio, television, and information companies. AICA is the Italian Association for Informatics and Automatic Calculus.

Links

08 February 2005

"TERNANA OPERA EDUCATRICE Award"

In February 2005, Davide won first prize in the contest of Ternana Opera Educatrice (TOE) foundation and received the prize sum of 800 Euros. The prize is given every year to the best graduate student of his home town Terni.