Jiawei Fu

Rämistrasse 101

8092 Zürich

I am currently a master’s student in Robotics, Systems and Control advised by Prof. Marco Hutter at ETH Zurich.

Prior to my master’s study, I received my bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering (Elite Program) at Tsinghua University. During my undergraduate study, I received various awards and scholarships, such as National Scholarship (top 1%), Comprehensive Excellence Award (top 1%), and so on.

My research interests lie in two folds:

Vision-based agile robot control
Robot design for various tasks and environments

Research experience with vision-based agile robot control

I worked on training a deep sensorimotor policy for vision-based autonomous drone racing under the supervision of Prof. Davide Scaramuzza at Robotics and Perception Group, University of Zurich.

Research experience with robot design for various tasks and environments

I am working on building the computational framework of morphology optimization for visual sensor parameters under the supervision of Prof. Amir Zamir at Visual Intelligence and Learning Lab, EPFL.

Prior to that, I worked on building the optimization framework for computational design of ANYmal-on-Wheels under the supervision of Prof. Marco Hutter at Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich.

Research experience with hardware

I worked on establish the electrical and mechanical system to build a multi-sensor system for autonomous driving under the supervision of Prof. Dengxin Dai at Vision for Autonomous Systems, Max Planck Institute for Informatics.

Prior to that, I worked on deisgn and manufacture the components of hardware development for humanoid soccer robot under the supervision of Prof. Jiwen Zhang at Institute of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University.

For more information about my experience, please refer to my CV page or my one-page CV (PDF).

News

Jun 30, 2023	One first-authored paper has been accepted to IROS 2023.
Dec 1, 2022	I will join Visual Intelligence and Learning Lab for my master’s thesis.
Apr 1, 2022	I will join Vision for Autonomous Systems as a research intern.
Sep 1, 2021	I will join Robotics and Perception Group as a student intern.

Selected Publications

2022

Learning Deep Sensorimotor Policies for Vision-based Autonomous Drone Racing

Jiawei Fu, Yunlong Song, Yan Wu, Fisher Yu, and Davide Scaramuzza

arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.14985, 2022

Abs arXiv Bib PDF Video

The development of effective vision-based algorithms has been a significant challenge in achieving autonomous drones, which promise to offer immense potential for many real-world applications. This paper investigates learning deep sensorimotor policies for vision-based drone racing, which is a particularly demanding setting for testing the limits of an algorithm. Our method combines feature representation learning to extract task-relevant feature representations from high-dimensional image inputs with a learning-by-cheating framework to train a deep sensorimotor policy for vision-based drone racing. This approach eliminates the need for globally-consistent state estimation, trajectory planning, and handcrafted control design, allowing the policy to directly infer control commands from raw images, similar to human pilots. We conduct experiments using a realistic simulator and show that our vision-based policy can achieve state-of-the-art racing performance while being robust against unseen visual disturbances. Our study suggests that consistent feature embeddings are essential for achieving robust control performance in the presence of visual disturbances. The key to acquiring consistent feature embeddings is utilizing contrastive learning along with data augmentation.
@article{fu2022learning, title = {Learning Deep Sensorimotor Policies for Vision-based Autonomous Drone Racing}, author = {Fu, Jiawei and Song, Yunlong and Wu, Yan and Yu, Fisher and Scaramuzza, Davide}, journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.14985}, year = {2022}, }