Abstract

As vision plays a key role in how we interpret a situation, developing vision-based perception for robots promises to be a big step towards robotic intelligence. This talk will discuss some of the biggest challenges we are faced with all the way from robust localisation and mapping, to collaborative perception and our recent progress in this area at the Vision for Robotics Lab of ETH Zurich (http://www.v4rl.ethz.ch).

Bio

Margarita Chli is an Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich leading the Vision for Robotics Lab (V4RL) . She is also the Vice Director of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS) of ETH Zurich and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh in the UK. Previously, she held the prestigious Chancellor's Fellowship of the University of Edinburgh at the School of Informatics, while currently she holds the highly competitive Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship. She holds Bachelor and Master degrees in Information and Computing Engineering from the University of Cambridge (Trinity College), and a PhD (thesis entitled Applying Information Theory to Efficient SLAM) from Imperial College London, UK.

Chli's research interest is in Computer Vision for Robotics, focusing on real-time perception for small aircraft, as some of the most challenging platforms for robotic perception. Some highlights of her career include the participation in the first vision-based autonomous flight of a small helicopter, a mention in Robohub's 2016 list of 25 women in Robotics you need to know about and the award of the biannual Zonta Prize in 2017 on the basis of her high impact contributions on the development of robotic vision. Moreover, her work at V4RL was featured in Reuters, while she was a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2017 as part of ETH Zurich's 3-strong delegation of professors.