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About

Philipp Foehn is a leading researcher in agile quadrotor flight, whose work pushes the boundaries of speed, autonomy, and real-world applicability. His primary research areas span time-optimal trajectory planning, visual-inertial odometry, and open-source robotic platforms. Foehn’s most influential contribution is his work on time-optimal planning for quadrotor waypoint flight (217 citations), which solves the fundamental challenge of generating trajectories that push drones to their actuation limits while passing through multiple waypoints—critical for applications like drone racing, inspection, and search and rescue. He further advanced this with Complementary Progress Constraints (CPC), enabling even more efficient solutions. Foehn also led the development of Agilicious (127 citations), an open-source and open-hardware platform that standardizes agile quadrotor research, allowing practitioners to focus on core perception, planning, and control challenges. Additionally, his VIMO framework (63 citations) introduces simultaneous visual-inertial model-based odometry and external force estimation, enhancing a drone’s ability to distinguish between intended motion and environmental disturbances. Through these contributions, Foehn has become a pivotal figure in making autonomous, high-speed quadrotor flight both theoretically rigorous and practically accessible.