20 A native of Terni in the province of Umbria, central Italy, Dr Davide Scaramuzza leads a team of researchers in the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, which is working to develop technology to enable autonomous UAVs to fly themselves as well as or even better than the best human pilots. He and his team took a big step in that direction in June 2022 when their tiny Swift quadcopter, equipped with a camera, inertial sensors and a neural network controller, beat a group of world champion UAV racing pilots over a demanding course by half a second – a wide margin at this level of the sport and an important milestone on a development path stretching back almost 15 years. Other milestones include enabling UAVs to perform aerobatic manoeuvres autonomously and to navigate in environments of which they have no prior knowledge. Together, these are steps towards a broader capability he calls agile navigation. Proxies for usefulness Dr Scaramuzza is the first to admit that performing stunts and winning races do not solve any of the weighty problems facing humanity that he really wants to tackle with the help of UAVs, but a lap time is a hard measure of technological progress, and the best human pilots are relatable comparators. “These tasks are not very useful in practice, but they serve as proxies in developing algorithms that can one day be used for things that matter to society, such as cargo delivery, forest monitoring, infrastructure inspection, search & rescue and so on,” he says. With small multi-copters in particular, speed is important if the UAVs are to maximise their productivity in the 30 minutes or so of flight time that their limited battery capacities allow. Also, flying a UAV as close to its best range speed as possible maximises its productivity, as Dr Scaramuzza’s team has shown. Setting his work in context, he places it where robotics, machine vision and neuroscience meet. The spark for his interest here was struck when, in his last year at university, he attended a match Peter Donaldson talks to this robotics and perception professor about his work on developing vision-based navigation for UAVs Field of vision The University of Zurich team supervises their Swift quadcopter as it finds its way around the course, over which it beat several world champion UAV racing pilots (Images courtesy of the University of Zurich) October/November 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology
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