Davide Scaramuzza
Davide Scaramuzza is a robotics professor whose research develops deep-learning, perception, and control methods for autonomous drones and other agile robots. He earns engineering and robotics degrees in Perugia and Zurich, then coordinates sFly's visual-inertial navigation project for drones without GPS. His group develops event-camera perception and Swift, a drone trained with deep reinforcement learning that beats human racing champions. After co-founding Zurich-Eye, which develops Meta Quest head-tracking software, he receives the 2024 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Technical Field Award.
- Now at
- University of Zurich
- Works
- 520
- Citations
- 45,859
- h-index
- 114
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
-
2004
An engineering degree
He earns a summa cum laude master's degree in Electronics and Information Engineering at the University of Perugia.
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2008
A doctorate in robotics
At ETH Zurich, he completes a PhD in Robotics and Computer Vision.
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2009–2012
Flying without GPS
He coordinates sFly, a European project for visual-inertial drone navigation in GPS-denied environments.
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2012
An early career award
He joins UZH as an assistant professor in Human Oriented Robotics and receives the European Young Researcher Award for his flying-robot work.
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2015
A research spin-off
He co-founds Zurich-Eye, later Meta Zurich; the company develops head-tracking software for Meta Quest.
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2022–2023
Swift races champions
In 2022, Swift races three human drone champions and wins several races, with the fastest recorded time. The autonomous drone combines deep reinforcement learning in simulation with real-world data.
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2024
An IEEE field award
He receives the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Technical Field Award for agile visual navigation of microdrones and low-latency perception with event cameras.
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As of October 2026
Researching autonomous robots
He is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at the University of Zurich and an ELLIS Fellow affiliated with UZH and ETH Zurich. His group researches robust deep learning, perception, and control for autonomous navigation of agile robots using onboard perception and computation.
Sources and credits
Photo: rpg.ifi.uzh.ch; Davide Scaramuzza; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: rpg.ifi.uzh.ch. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
- Davide Scaramuzza
- Mini-Hubschrauber retten Leben | UZH News | UZH
- High-speed AI Drone | | UZH
- Champion-level drone racing using deep reinforcement learning | Nature
- IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award to Davide Scaramuzza | Department of Informatics | UZH
- Davide Scaramuzza | European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems
- Robotics and Perception Group – IRIS - Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems | ETH Zurich