About me
Hi! I am a Senior Autonomy Engineer at Skydio, where we build the best drones in the world for capturing cinematic video, inspecting critical infrastructure, and providing situational awareness. Previously, I was a PhD student at the Robotics and Perception Group directed by Prof. Davide Scaramuzza.
My research interests lie in the combination of machine learning methods with traditional planning and control for autonomous systems. During my PhD, I applied my ideas mainly to quadrotors and liked to push these astonishing machines to their physical limits, while only relying on onboard sensing and computation.
I received my masters degree in Robotics, Systems and Control from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Raffaello D’Andrea.
Education
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PhD in Robotics, 2022
Robotics and Perception Group
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MSc in Robotics, Systems and Control, 2017
ETH Zurich
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BSc in Mechanical Engineering, 2014
ETH Zurich
Awards
Frontier of Science Award
- Category: Robotics, Science and Systems, 2023
Best Paper Award Honorable Mention
- IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2020
Best Systems Paper Award
- Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2020
Best Paper Award Finalist
- Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2020
Best Systems Paper Award
- Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2018
Recent Publications
A Benchmark Comparison of Learned Control Policies for Agile Quadrotor Flight
Real-time Neural-MPC: Deep Learning Model Predictive Control for Quadrotors and Agile Robotic Platforms
Performance, Precision, and Payloads: Adaptive Nonlinear MPC for Quadrotors
Autonomous Drone Racing with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Autonomous Overtaking in Gran Turismo Sport Using Curriculum Reinforcement Learning
Super-Human Performance in Gran Turismo Sport Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Deep Drone Racing: From Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization
Beauty and the Beast: Optimal Methods Meet Learning for Drone Racing
Contact
- ekaufmann (at) ifi (dot) uzh (dot) ch