Timo Hinzmann

Short Resume

	12/2014-today	Ph.D. student at the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL), ETH Zurich under Prof. Roland Siegwart. Involved in the FP7 EU projects SHERPA and ICARUS as well as SolAir and AtlantikSolar.
	04/2014-11/2014	Master Thesis “Robust vision-based navigation for micro air vehicles” (5.75/6.0) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology / NASA. Supervised by Stephan Weiss and Roland Brockers.
	10/2012-11/2014	M.Sc. Robotics, Systems and Control at ETH Zurich (ETHZ). Semester project: “Adaptive control of multirotor aerial vehicles” (6.0/6.0) at ETH Zurich’s Autonomous Systems Lab. Supervised by Michael Burri, Sammy Omari and Markus Achtelik.
	01/2012-09/2012	Internship at BMW Research and Development, Munich. Project Connected Drive. Supervised by Philipp Reinisch and Moritz Werling.
	10/2008-10/2011	B.Sc. Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Bachelor Thesis: “Path planning of a differential drive ground robot” (1.0/1.0) at the Institute of Systems Optimization (ITE). Supervised by Justus Seibold.
	07/1999-07/2008	Abitur (1.0/1.0) at Kepler Gymnasium Pforzheim, Germany. Nominated scholarship of German National Academic foundation; DMV award of German Mathematician Society; School prize. 1-year exchange student at US High School, Holliday, TX, USA.

Selected Projects

• AtlantikSolar: 81 hour endurance world record flight

  This video shows ETH Zurich's AtlantikSolar 2 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle during its continuous flight of 2338km and 81.5 hours (4 days and 3 nights) that took place between July 14th-17th 2015 and broke the flight endurance world record for all aircrafts below 50kg total mass. In addition, the fully solar-powered flight is the longest-ever flight of a low-altitude long-endurance (LALE) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, the second-longest flight among any UAV, and the fifth-longest flight ever shown by any aircraft worldwide. From an applications perspective, the flight proves the central commercially-promising advantage of solar-powered UAVs, i.e. their capability to stay airborne for multiple days while providing telecommunication services in large-scale disaster-scenarios or live-imagery during industrial sensing and inspection missions.

• EuroNews report on EU-funded project SHERPA

• AtlantikSolar: Flying a solar-powered 26-hour Search-and-Rescue mission

  Atlantik-Solar is a novel kind of solar-powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for ultra-long endurance flight applications. In 2015, it demonstrated a continuous 81-hour solar-powered flight that is the current world record in flight endurance for all aircrafts below 50kg total mass. The flight shown here, performed from July 19th - 20th 2016, represents the next major milestone: The first-ever fully-autonomous - from launch to landing - solar-powered perpetual flight with a color + thermal camera payload in a 26-hour Search-and-Rescue mission.

• VertiGo: The Wall-Racing Robot

  This wall-racing robot is able to drive on the floor as well as on walls and transition between the two automatically. It was created during a one year project at ETH Zürich as a collaboration with Disney Research Zürich by team VertiGo.

Publications

Journal

Close

Philipp Oettershagen, Amir Melzer, Thomas Mantel, Konrad Rudin, Thomas Stastny, Bartosz Wawrzacz, Timo Hinzmann, Stefan Leutenegger, Kostas Alexis, and Roland Siegwart, "Design of small hand-launched solar-powered UAVs: From concept study to a multi-day world endurance record flight". In Journal of Field Robotics (JFR), 2017. [PDF | Bibtex | Video ]

Conference

Close	Timo Hinzmann, and Roland Siegwart, "Mapping on the Fly: Real-time 3D Dense Reconstruction, Digital Surface Map and Incremental Orthomosaic Generation for Fixed-Wing UAVs". In 11th Conference on Field and Service Robotics (FSR), 2017, Zurich, Switzerland.
Close	Mathias Gehrig, Elena Stumm, Timo Hinzmann, and Roland Siegwart, "Visual Place Recognition with Probabilistic Vertex Voting". In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017, Singapore. [PDF | Bibtex]
Close	Timo Hinzmann, Thomas Schneider, Marcin Dymczyk, Andreas Schaffner, Simon Lynen, Roland Siegwart, and Igor Gilitschenski, "Monocular Visual-Inertial SLAM for Fixed-Wing UAVs Using Sliding Window Based Nonlinear Optimization". In International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC), 2016, Las Vegas, USA. [PDF | Bibtex]
Close	Julius Kümmerle, Timo Hinzmann, Anurag Vempati, and Roland Siegwart, "Real-Time Detection and Tracking of Multiple Humans from High Bird’s-Eye Views in the Visual and Infrared Spectrum". In International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC), 2016, Las Vegas, USA. [PDF | Bibtex]
Close	Timo Hinzmann, Thomas Schneider, Marcin Tomasz Dymczyk, Amir Melzer, Thomas Mantel, Igor Gilitschenski, and Roland Siegwart, "Robust Map Generation for Fixed-Wing UAVs with Low-Cost Highly-Oblique Monocular Cameras". In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2016, Daejeon, South Korea. 48% acceptance rate. [PDF | Bibtex]
Close	Patrick Doherty, Jonas Kvarnström, Piotr Rudol, Marius Wzorek, Gianpaolo Conte, Cyrille Berger, Timo Hinzmann, and Thomas Stastny, "A Collaborative Framework for 3D Mapping using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles". In International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-agent Systems (PRIMA), 2016, Phuket, Thailand. [PDF | Bibtex | Datasets | Code]
Close	Philipp Oettershagen, Amir Melzer, Thomas Mantel, Konrad Rudin, Thomas Stastny, Bartosz Wawrzacz, Timo Hinzmann, Kostas Alexis, and Roland Siegwart, "Perpetual flight with a small solar-powered UAV: Flight results, performance analysis and model validation". In IEEE Aerospace Conference, 2016, Zurich, Switzerland. [PDF | Bibtex]
Close	Timo Hinzmann, Thomas Stastny, Gianpaolo Conte, Patrick Doherty, Piotr Rudol, Marius Wzorek, Igor Gilitschenski, Enric Galceran, and Roland Siegwart, "Collaborative 3D Reconstruction using Heterogeneous UAVs: System and Experiments". In International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER), 2016, Tokyo, Japan. [PDF | Bibtex | Datasets | Code]
Close	Joern Rehder, Janosch Nikolic, Thomas Schneider, Timo Hinzmann, and Roland Siegwart, "Extending kalibr: Calibrating the Extrinsics of Multiple IMUs and of Individual Axes". In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2016, Stockholm, Sweden. 34.7% acceptance rate. [PDF | Bibtex | Code]

Thesis

Close	Timo Hinzmann, "Robust Vision-Based Navigation for Micro Air Vehicles". Master Thesis, 2014, Pasadena, USA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL/NASA), clearance no. CL#15-1078. [PDF | Bibtex]
Close	Timo Hinzmann, "Adaptive Rate Control for Multirotor UAVs". Semester Thesis, 2014, Zurich, Switzerland, Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL), ETH Zurich (ETHZ). [PDF | Bibtex]
Close	Timo Hinzmann, "Pfadplanung in Innenräumen und Integration in eine Simulationsumgebung für autonome Bodenfahrzeuge". Bachelor Thesis, 2011, Karlsruhe, Germany, Institute of Systems Optimization (ITE), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). [PDF | Bibtex]

Teaching (ETH Zurich)

Close	Programming exercise accompanying lecture "Artificial Intelligence for Robotics", Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zurich Exercise 3: Pose Graph Optimization (PGO) and Iterative Closest Point (ICP). Python impl. of "A Tutorial on Graph-Based SLAM", Alg. 1 Python impl. of standard ICP [Exercise Sheet | Exercise | Solutions | Score Sheet]
Close	Exercise accompanying lecture "Autonomous Mobile Robots", Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zurich Exercise 3: Line Extraction [Matlab/VRep Exercise | Solutions | Slides] Exercise 4: Line-based Extended Kalman Filter [Matlab/VRep Exercise | Solutions | Slides | Video: Init Simulation]

Completed Student Projects (ETH Zurich)

• "Autonomous Rotorcraft Landing with Structured Light Stereo Vision", Master thesis by Marius Huber; supervised by Larry Matthies (JPL), Timo Hinzmann, Thomast Stastny

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• "Development of a Comprehensive, Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation Environment for Fixed-Wing UAVs", Master thesis by Pavel Vechersky; supervised by Timo Hinzmann, Thomast Stastny, Philipp Oettershagen [Code]

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• "Robust and Efficient Loop-Closure Detection for Aerial Images", Master thesis by Mathias Gehrig; supervised by Timo Hinzmann, Elena Stumm [Conference Paper]

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• "Ridge Lift Exploitation for Small Unmanned Fixed-Wing Aircraft", Master Thesis by Nicolas El Hayek; supervised by Thomas Stastny, Philipp Oettershagen, Timo Hinzmann

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• "Thermal Updraft Prediction for a Fixed-Wing UAVs", Master thesis by Bastien Chatton; supervised by Philipp Oettershagen, Timo Hinzmann

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• "Real-time Detection and Tracking of Multiple Human Targets from Aerial Vehicles Using Thermal Imagery", Master thesis by Julius Kümmerle; supervised by Timo Hinzmann, Anurag Vempati [Conference Paper]

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• "GNSS-Based Attitude Determination for Automatic Magnetometer Calibration", Master thesis by Ricardo Zurfluh; supervised by Timo Hinzmann, Amir Melzer

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• "Vision-Based Autonomous Landing of an Unmanned Fixed-Wing UAV", Master thesis by Felix Renaut; supervised by Timo Hinzmann, Thomas Stastny

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• "Tightly Coupled GNSS Integration into a SLAM Framework", Master thesis by Andreas Forster; supervised by Timo Hinzmann

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• "Demonstration of Visual Navigation with Fixed-Wing UAVs", Master thesis by Andreas Schaffner; supervised by Timo Hinzmann, Gabriel Agamennoni, Tim Dawson-Townsend (Aurora)

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• "Control of a Wall Racing Robot for Agile Ground Maneuvers", Bachelor thesis by Michael Arigoni; supervised by Timo Hinzmann, Lennon Rodgers (MIT) [Video]