Andrew Davison (@AjdDavison) / X

Andrew Davison

3,853 posts

Andrew Davison

@AjdDavison

From SLAM to Spatial AI; Professor of Robot Vision, Imperial College London; Director of the Dyson Robotics Lab; Co-Founder of Slamcore. FREng, FRS.

London, England

Joined May 2013

Pinned
Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Feb 4
New version of Cycling Neuroevolution, with: - Save/load favourite riders - Controllable rider: race against AI - Sound! Try it immediately (best on a computer): doc.ic.ac.uk/~ajd/Cycling/ Strong climbing from Tadej before mysteriously stopping near the top! More evolution needed.
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Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Jun 1, 2023
Many cool demos in the exhibition hall at #ICRA2023 of advanced robots of all types. I liked this one which seems quite simple in comparison but just very clearly showing very fast and precise motor control.
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Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Mar 28, 2022
New: 3D neural fields like NeRF do automatic, unsupervised semantic scene decomposition. We reveal it with tiny interactions. Real-time SOTA room segmentation from 140 clicks; zero prior data! iLabel, Dyson Robotics Lab, @SucarEdgar @Shuaifeng_Zhi et al. edgarsucar.github.io/ilabel/
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Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Sep 2, 2021
This summer I've been working to finally understand Lie Theory, the basis for proper estimation on over-parameterised manifolds like SE(3). There are some great tutorials for the roboticist out there; I especially like Micro Lie Theory by Solà et al. arxiv.org/abs/1812.01537
Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Feb 10, 2021
All researchers should fight against this. Every week I try to persuade my students that top papers often have few quantitative results. With work that's new, important, and clearly qualitatively different (zero to one!), you don't need quantitative results. Demos not tables!
Peyman Milanfar
@docmilanfar
Feb 10, 2021
The author's dilemma, circa 2021
Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Dec 16, 2024
MASt3R-SLAM: it's easily the most robust dense monocular SLAM system I've ever seen, and also very accurate. Real-time, RGB only (no IMU), handles unknown focal length and zoom. More new videos coming soon @eric_dexheimer @rmurai0610. Paper and full info: edexheim.github.io/mast3r-slam
Riku Murai
@rmurai0610
Dec 16, 2024
Introducing MASt3R-SLAM, the first real-time monocular dense SLAM with MASt3R as a foundation. Easy to use like DUSt3R/MASt3R, from an uncalibrated RGB video it recovers accurate, globally consistent poses & a dense map. With @eric_dexheimer*, @AjdDavison (*Equal Contribution)
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Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
May 16, 2025
Full draft of the SLAM Handbook now released --- available as a free PDF, with a printed version coming soon. Now including Part 3, "From SLAM to Spatial AI" (I knew it would catch on eventually), with contributions from @HideMatsu82 and me. #SpatialAI
GitHub - SLAM-Handbook-contributors/slam-handbook-public-release: Release repo for our SLAM Handbook
From github.com
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Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
May 10, 2023
Very proud, and still a bit shocked, to share that I've been elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Thank you to my students and collaborators from Imperial College, Oxford, AIST, Dyson, Slamcore and beyond, and of course to my supportive family and friends! royalsociety.org/people/andrew-…
The Royal Society
@royalsociety
May 10, 2023
We are very happy to announce the eighty exceptional scientists elected as Fellows of the Royal Society this year, selected for their outstanding contributions to the advancement of science. Meet the new Fellows and find out more about their research: royalsociety.org/news/2023/05/n…
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Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Oct 12, 2021
What an honour to win a PAMI Helmholtz Award at #ICCV2021. DTAM (ICCV 2011) is a paper with few results, and barely got in as a poster. But once @rapideRobot and @stevenjl got the big laptop to Barcelona we showed people a live dense SLAM and AR demo they had never seen before!
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Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Mar 24, 2021
iMAP is a new way to do SLAM: we learn an implicit neural representation *in real time* and track an RGB-D camera against it. The implicit map fills holes; completes the unseen backs of objects; and maps a whole room in only 1MB of weights. From the Dyson Robotics Lab, Imperial.
Edgar Sucar
@SucarEdgar
Mar 24, 2021
Excited to share iMAP, first real-time SLAM system to use an implicit scene network as map representation. Work with: @liu_shikun, @joeaortiz, @AjdDavison Project page: edgarsucar.github.io/iMAP/ Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2103.12352
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Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Jul 9, 2019
The thing I'm proudest of in my career is the work I've done with the PhD students I've supervised at Imperial College. Their final PhD theses are sometimes hard to find so I've gathered links to all of them on my homepage at doc.ic.ac.uk/~ajd/ ... please have a look! 1/n
Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Nov 8, 2021
Yes! Zero to One research is also something I'm always trying to do and explain to my students. I strongly feel it's too early for benchmarking in much of vision/robotics/AI, when basic things are still not possible. We need demos of new capability, not tables!
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Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Aug 3, 2025
I still don't believe that Spatial AI is a big data problem. Massive data won't unlock robotics. Representation is still the hard bit. We need efficient, composable representation of 3D physical scenes to enable mental simulation like humans use to plan creative uses of objects.
Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Jun 6, 2023
Seems like a good moment to tweet a few quotes from my 2018 position paper: FutureMapping: The Computational Structure of Spatial AI Systems. #SpatialAI arxiv.org/abs/1803.11288
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Andrew Davison
@AjdDavison
Feb 8, 2022
Robot Web: breakthrough many-robot localisation. Uses efficient, general message passing over dynamic graphs. Accurate and highly robust to sensor/comms failure. @rmurai0610 @joeaortiz @SaeediG @paulhjkelly Full video demo: youtu.be/xQcYwONtMN0 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2202.03314
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