Antonio Loquercio Personal Website

Antonio Loquercio, assistant professor at University of Pennsylvania.

I am broadly interested in the problem of physical intelligence, whose overarching goal is to empower robots with the capability to learn, understand, and interact with their surroundings in a way that is both reliable and adaptable. My main emphasis is agile autonomy: I build robots that, with only on-board sensing and computation, can perform complex tasks with great speed, precision, and agility. To do so, I design unified approaches to perception and action drawing from the fields of computer vision and artificial intelligence.

I received my doctoral degree at the University of Zurich with the Robotics and Perception Group working with Prof. Davide Scaramuzza. After that, I was a PostDoc at BAIR with Prof. Jitendra Malik.

Quick Links: Google Scholar | CV

I am recruiting! Please follow the instructions on this page to apply for a PhD. In your application, please make sure to mention my name under faculty you are interested in working with. If you're already at UPenn, please fill this form. We're going to get back to you if we have a project that fits your skills and interests.

News

December, 2025. Keynote at the Computing on the Fly Workshop.
November, 2025. AI Seminar at Oregon State University.
November, 2025. Guest Lecture at Cornell University.
October, 2025. Honored to win the ISNAFF Mario Gerla Young Investigator Award!
June, 2025. Keynote at CVPR'25 Workshop on Embodied Intelligence for Autonomous Systems.
September, 2024. Talk at the GRASP for Robotics's Seminar.
July, 2024. One paper accepted at ECCV 2024!
June, 2024. One paper accepted at Transaction of Robotics (T-RO)!
May, 2024. Three papers presented at ICRA 2024!
Mar, 2024. One paper accepted at CVPR 2024!
Sep, 2023. My article on vision-based autonomous drone racing is on the cover of Nature!
July, 2023. I gave a keynote at the Conference of Basic Sciences in Beijing.
Jan, 2023. Three papers accepted at ICRA 2023!
Jan, 2023. Our survey on drone racing is finally out! You can check it out here.
July, 2022. I gave a keynote on agile flight at a robotics seminar at MIT!
June, 2022. I won the Georges Giralt PhD Award!
June, 2022. One paper accepted at Science Robotics!
May, 2022. I gave three keynotes at different workshops at ICRA on agile flight and the value of competitions for robotics research!
May, 2022. I organized the DodgeDrone Competition at ICRA 2022!
Mar, 2022. I gave a talk about the key ingredients for autonomous flight at the AiR Seminar in Toronto!
Mar, 2022. One paper accepted at Plus-One!
Feb, 2022. I gave a talk about the affinities between computer vision and robotics at an ELLIS Seminar in Turin!
Jan, 2022. One paper accepted at RAL-ICRA 2022! Looking forward to meeting colleagues in Philadelphia in May!
Nov, 2021. I've started my PostDoc at UC Berkeley!
Oct, 2021. Our latest paper Learning High-Speed Flight in the Wild was published in Science Robotics! Our work was featured in IEEE Spectrum and Forbes, among others!
May, 2021. I successfully defended my PhD thesis Learning Agile Robot Navigation with summa cum laude! Check out the video recording on YouTube! I will continue as a PostDoc at the same lab!
Apr, 2021. My paper Deep Drone Racing: From Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization won the Best Paper Award Honorable Mention for the journal Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)!
Mar, 2021. I am co-organizing the workshop on Perception and Action in Dynamic Environments and the associated DodgeDrone Challenge. Feel free to join if you are interested in computer vision, machine learning, or control in complex environments!
Dec, 2020. My paper Agile Autonomy: High-Speed Flight with On-Board Sensing and Computing was nominated for the Best Paper Award at IRIM-3D 2020!
Oct, 2020. One paper accepted at the Conference on Robotic Learning (CoRL) 2020!
Sept, 2020. One paper accepted at the Conference Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020!
July, 2020. My paper Deep Drone Acrobatics was nominated for the Best Paper Award at RSS 2020!
July, 2020. One paper accepted at European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020.
June, 2020. One paper accepted at the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and IROS, 2020.
June, 2020. I gave a keynote talk together with Prof. Davide Scaramuzza about Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Learning and Drone Acrobatics at the ICRA 2020 Workshop Perception, Action, and Learning. A recording of the talk is available at this link.
May, 2020. I gave a talk about Learning Agile Flight at the UZH Deep Learning Symposium. A recording of the talk is available at this link.
May, 2020. One paper accepted at the Robotics, Science and Systems (RSS) Conference, 2020.
April, 2020. My paper Learning Depth with Very Sparse Supervision was presented as a Spotlight at the ICLR 2020 Workshop Bridging AI and Cognitive Science (BAICS).
Jan., 2020. One paper accepted for publication at the Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and International Conference for Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020.
Nov., 2019. I gave a talk about autonomous drone navigation and event cameras at the Zurich Machine Learning Meetup. A recording of the talk is available at this link.
July, 2019. One paper accepted at the IEEE Transactions on Robotics Journal (TR-O), 2019.
July, 2019. One paper accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019.
March, 2019. One paper accepted at the IEEE Internet of Things (IoT) Journal, 2019.
Feb., 2019. One paper accepted at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision (CVPR), 2019.
Sept., 2018. One paper accepted at the Conference on Robotics Learning (CORL), 2018.
April, 2018. I am spending a six month exchange period at the UCLA Vision Lab led by Prof. Stefano Soatto.
Feb., 2018. One paper accepted at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision (CVPR), 2018.
Jan., 2018. One paper accepted at the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2018.
June, 2017. I was awarded the ETH Medal for an outstanding master thesis.

Awards

ISNAFF Young Investigator Mario Gerla Award, 2025.
Georges Giralt PhD Award, the most prestigious recognition for a dissertation on robotics in Europe, 2022.
Outstanding Reviewer Award, Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2022.
Best Paper Award Honorable Mention, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2020.
Best Paper Award Finalist, Conference on Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM-3D), 2020.
Best Paper Award Finalist, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2020.
Best System Paper Award, Conference on Robotic Learning (CoRL), 2018.
ETH-Medal for Outstanding Master Thesis, 2017.

Selected Talks

Simulation: What made us intelligent will make our robots intelligent, GRASP for Robotics Seminar, Sep 2024

Selected Publications

Personal favorites in a few areas of robotics and deep learning.

Teaching

Teaching is like going to the gym. It's sometimes hard, but the results are worth it.

Fall 2025: Physical Intelligence.
Spring 2025: Real-World Robot Learning. (Seminar)

Agile Flight

Locomotion

Learning from Videos and 3D

Machine Learning, Algorithms