We Are ETH Teaching Drones to See with Margarita Chli
May 8, 2025
Margarita Chli, Head of the Vision for Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich and the University of Cyprus, shares her groundbreaking work in teaching drones to perceive their surroundings. She discusses the challenges of robotic vision and the fascinating applications in areas like wildfire management and search and rescue. The conversation also highlights the ethical implications of dual-use technologies and the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration. Margarita emphasizes how curiosity fuels scientific discovery and the evolving role of AI in robotics.
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Design Vision Around Hardware Limits
- Vision systems must be designed around the sensor and compute limits of the platform.
- Algorithms change dramatically if you have few pixels, low compute, or limited battery on a small drone.
Swarm Views Beat Single Perspectives
- Multiple robots viewing a scene can produce richer information than a single human viewpoint.
- Sharing views at runtime enables better decisions but raises hard questions about what to exchange.
Choose What To Share In A Swarm
- Prioritize which data to share in a drone swarm because bandwidth and reliability are limited.
- Work with communications and hardware experts to pick the best protocols and devices for the mission.