We’re excited to announce our partnership with the ETH AI Center, sparked through work with the renowned Robotics and Perception Group (RPG), one of the pioneers in aerial robotics and vision-aided navigation.
ETH Zurich is one of the world’s leading research institutions in robotics and has fueled many successful startups such as Anybotics, Seervision, Wingtra, Verity, and Zurich Eye. Its contributions make Switzerland an ideal ecosystem for robotics development, with its blend of top-tier research institutions, a rich talent pool, and notable industrial companies like ABB and Stäubli.
As a former RPG graduate student in 2013, I created the initial version of the Zurich Urban Micro Aerial Vehicle Dataset, one of the first public multi-modal datasets in urban environments. It included time-synchronized aerial images, GPS and IMU data, as well as ground-level street view data. Back in 2013, it was already evident that handling large amounts of sensor data – offloading, storing, retrieving, curating, and sharing it – was a considerable challenge. Unfortunately, a decade later, the tools and infrastructure for managing this data haven’t really improved. These limitations persist equally in academia and industry, underlining a widespread need for better solutions.
Inspired by the machine learning community, which has successfully adopted a data-centric approach to publishing research, we envision a similar trajectory for the field of robotics. With Roboto's data infrastructure, we are catalyzing this shift towards a more data-driven model in robotics research and development.
We’re really excited to collaborate further with all of the incredible researchers at the ETH AI Center. Stay tuned for updates!
-- Yves
