Innovation in (Soft) Robotics and Control
Robotics, Vision, and Controls Talks
Welcome to the (soft) Robotics, Vision, and Controls Talks series hosted by ETH Zürich. These open talks focus on innovations in (soft) robotics, computer vision, and control systems, and are held in a hybrid format at ETH Zürich’s main campus.
About the Series
Schedule:
- Even weeks: Wednesdays at 12:00 PM UTC+1 in HG F26.5 (46 seats)
- Odd weeks: Fridays at 4:00 PM UTC+1 in HG E41 (50 seats)
- Location: ETH Zürich
- Join via Zoom – https://ethz.zoom.us/j/63716670526
Upcoming Talks
Next Talk
Embodied Multimodal Intelligence with Foundation Models
Speaker: Dr. Oier Mees
In Person
Affiliation: UC Berkeley
Date: March 14, 2025
Time & Location: 16:00 CET; ETH HG E 41
Abstract
“Despite considerable progress in robot learning, most real-world robots remain confined to a narrow set of preprogrammed behaviors, falling short of public expectations. As robots become more ubiquitous in human-centered environments, the need for “generalist” robots grows: how can we scale robot learning systems to generalize and adapt, enabling them to perform a wide range of everyday tasks in unstructured settings based on arbitrary user instructions? In this talk, I will discuss the challenges and opportunities in building robot foundation models and outline the key ingredients for developing generalist robot policies—including cross-embodied learning, multimodal alignment, and scalable learning and evaluation procedures. I will present the first instantiation of such a model, capable of performing bimanual manipulation, visual navigation, quadruped locomotion, single-arm manipulation, and even aviation. I will then discuss how this model serves as a pre-trained backbone for downstream tasks, including humanoid control. Finally, I will show how incorporating intelligent reasoning not only enables robots to use common sense to think before acting, but also significantly enhances their generalization, interpretability, and ability to interact effectively with humans.”
Bio
“Dr. Oier Mees is a PostDoc at UC Berkeley working with Prof. Sergey Levine. He received his PhD in Computer Science (summa cum laude) in 2023 from the Freiburg University supervised by Prof. Dr. Wolfram Burgard. Oier’s research focuses on robot learning, to enable robots to intelligently interact with both the physical world and humans, and improve themselves over time. These days, he is particularly interested in how we can build self-improving embodied foundation models that can generalize the same way humans do. His research has been nominated for (and received) several Best Paper Awards, including ICRA and RA-L. Previously, Oier also spent time at NVIDIA AI interning with Dieter Fox.”
Future Talks
Robots With a Twist
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Jeffrey Lipton
Affiliation: Northeastern / BG
Date: March 19, 2025
Time & Location: 16:00 CET; HG F 26.1
More info
Abstract
"Robot bodies abilities depend on the materials they are made from. Soft robotics has aimed to transform the material basis of robotics by making everything squishy. This has come at the cost of losing motors as a primary actuation source. In this talk we will show how to bridge traditional and soft robotics using metamaterials that respond to torque. I will show how metamaterial robotics allows us to improve how robots can grasp, walk and interact with people while leveraging traditional robotic actuation and control. We will talk about the design pipeline from math, through materials to moving robots with applications in manufacturing."
Bio
"Dr. Jeffrey Lipton Ph.D. is an assistant professor at Northeastern University in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department. Previously he was at the University of Washington in the Mechanical Engineering Department with a courtesy appointment in the Paul G. Allan School of Computer Science and Engineering and a founding Director of the Center for Digital Fabrication. He was a Post Doctoral Associate at the MIT’s CSAIL in the Distributed Robotics Lab under Daniela Rus. He received his BS in Applied and Engineering Physics and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell. His Ph.D. work was under Hod Lipson in the Creative Machines Lab. His work is currently focused on 3D printing and robotics.His past work on 3D printed foods and 3D printing for the hospitality industry has influenced two of the largest 3D printing companies in America and garnered media attention from the New York Times, BBC, and others. He was the lead developer for the Fab@Home project which supported life science and food science researchers’ 3D printing needs on all six habitable continents"
Desktop to Deep Sea: Mechanical Programming of Soft Machines
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Kaitlyn Becker
In PersonAffiliation: MIT
Date: March 28, 2025
Time & Location: 16:00 CET; ETH HG E 41
More info
Abstract
"As a relatively nascent field, soft robotics can leverage design, modeling, and manufacturing frameworks from a long history of traditional (rigid) machine design. The application of traditional rigid machine design and manufacturing tools enables rapid innovation in a new field, though these tools and methodologies are built on assumptions of rigid materials and small deformations. In contrast, the most successful soft robotic and morphing matter designs are ones that leverage large deformations. Informed by functional requirements of deep-sea biological sampling, I will show how details of material choice, structural design, and manufacturing come together to mechanically program soft machines. This includes how rapid physical and digital prototyping tools fit into this process, as well as a more in-depth multi-objective optimization tool to tune the design of soft structures intended for large deformations. Digital modeling and optimization is a powerful tool that has and will continue to accelerate the development of novel soft robotic structures, but I will also discuss gaps between modeling and manufacturing; we are able to capture benefits from geometric design optimization, but ultimate performance of morphing matter and soft robots is also affected by geometric variation and defects that result from manufacturing. I will show how manufacturing strategies can mitigate cost and complexity of fabrication with little to no adjustments to geometry. I will also show how the adjustments in manufacturing processes can significantly improve the reliability and performance of soft, morphing machines, achieving higher payloads, higher burst pressures, and lower failure rates. "
Bio
"Kaitlyn Becker is an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department and recipient of the Doherty Professorship in Ocean Utilization at MIT. She works on gentle and adaptive soft robots for grasping and manipulation from the desktop to the deep sea and focuses on novel soft robotic platforms that add functionality through innovations at the intersection of design and fabrication. Her creations have been successfully tested at depths down to 3.5km and have been featured on the covers of the journals Soft Robotics and Advanced Functional Materials, and in the Unseen Oceans special exhibit in the American Natural History Museum. Prior to joining the Mechanical engineering department at MIT, she completed her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, worked in medical device manufacturing, worked in nanofabrication and UV water treatment, completed her PhD at Harvard in the Microrobotics Lab in 2021, and was postdoctoral researcher in Professor Mahadevan’s Soft Math lab at Harvard University."
Video understanding for skill learning
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Kristen Grauman
Affiliation: UT Austin
Date: April 02, 2025
Time & Location: 12:00 CET; ETH HG F 26.5
More info
Abstract
"The first-person or “egocentric” perspective offers a special window into an agent’s attention, goals, and interactions, making it an exciting avenue for the future of both augmented reality and robot learning. This talk will describe our recent explorations for first-person perception, motivated particularly by learning about human skills from video. In this domain, key challenges are fine-grained activity understanding and relating first- and third- (actor and observer) perspectives. Towards addressing those challenges, we introduce new ideas for view-invariant representations, generating language commentary from visual demonstrations, and navigating massive corpora of how-to videos to discover task structure. I’ll also overview how we are advancing the frontier of egocentric perception for the broader community via large-scale open-sourced datasets called Ego4D and Ego-Exo4D—multi-year, multi-institutional efforts to capture daily-life and skilled activity of people around the world."
Bio
"Kristen Grauman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and a Research Director in Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab (FAIR). Her research in computer vision and machine learning focuses on visual recognition, video, and embodied perception. Before joining UT-Austin in 2007, she received her Ph.D. at MIT. She is an IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow, AAAI Fellow, Sloan Fellow, and recipient of the 2013 Computers and Thought Award. She and her collaborators have been recognized with several Best Paper awards in computer vision, including a 2011 Marr Prize and a 2017 Helmholtz Prize (test of time award). She has served as Associate Editor-in-Chief for PAMI and Program Chair of CVPR 2015, NeurIPS 2018, and ICCV 2023."
Building Generalist Robots with Agility via Learning and Control: Humanoids and Beyond
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Guanya Shi
Affiliation: CMU
Date: April 11, 2025
Time & Location: 16:00 CET; ETH HG E 41
More info
Abstract
"TBD"
Bio
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Pathway to Robotic Intelligence
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Pulkit Agrawal
In PersonAffiliation: MIT
Date: April 16, 2025
Time & Location: 12:00 CET; ETH HG F 26.5
More info
Abstract
"TBD"
Bio
"Pulkit Agrawal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and co-founded SafelyYou Inc. Pulkit completed his bachelor’s from IIT Kanpur and was awarded the Directors Gold Medal. His work has received multiple Best Paper Awards, the IEEE Early Career Award in Robotics, IIT Kanpur Young Alumnus Award, Sony Faculty Research Award, Salesforce Research Award, Amazon Research Award, Signatures Fellow Award, Fulbright Science and Technology Award, and others."
TBD
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Hilde Kuehne
Affiliation: Tuebingen AI Center and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
Date: April 30, 2025
Time & Location: 12:00 CET; ETH HG F 26.5
More info
Abstract
"TBD"
Bio
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Speaker: Prof. Dr. Xiaolong Wang
Affiliation: UC San Diego
Date: May 09, 2025
Time & Location: 16:00 CET; ETH HG E 41
More info
Abstract
"TBD"
Bio
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Speaker: Prof. Dr. Lingjie Liu
Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
Date: May 14, 2025
Time & Location: 12:00 CET; ETH HG F 26.5
More info
Abstract
"TBD"
Bio
"TBD"
TBD
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Cynthia Sung
Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
Date: May 23, 2025
Time & Location: 16:00 CET; ETH HG E 41
More info
Abstract
"TBD"
Bio
"TBD"
Soft and Perceptive Robots
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Perla Maiolino
In PersonAffiliation: University of Oxford
Date: May 28, 2025
Time & Location: 12:00 CET; ETH HG F 26.5
More info
Abstract
"For decades, robotics has been defined by the need to avoid physical contact for safety, leading to rigid machines that interact with their environment in a limited way. However, true intelligence emerges from physical interaction between the environment and an agent’s own body, through which an awareness of both the external environment and the Self is built. In this talk, we explore how soft robotics and tactile sensing are transforming robotic intelligence by making physical interaction a fundamental part of perception. By designing robots with compliant, adaptable bodies and highly integrated sensor technologies, we enable them to perceive the world through touch, much like biological organisms. In this paradigm, the body itself becomes an active component of sensing, shaping the data received and simplifying high-level inference. This requires advances in material and manufacturing methods, embedded sensing, and computational models that extract meaning from complex sensor inputs. We will discuss how these innovations allow robots to develop self-awareness, improve adaptability, and achieve more intelligent behaviour. Embracing contact, rather than avoiding it, opens new pathways for safer, more capable, and more intuitive robotic systems."
Bio
"Perla Maiolino (Member, IEEE) received the B.Eng. degree in software engineering, the M.Eng. degree in robotics and automation, and the Ph.D. degree in robotics from the University of Genoa. She joined the Mechatronic and Control Laboratory (MACLAB), Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and System Engineering (DIBRIS), University of Genoa, where, as a Research Fellow, carried out research about new technological solutions for the development and integration of distributed tactile sensors for providing robots with the “sense of touch.” Before joining Oxford Robotics Institutes she worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab (BIRL), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K., where she started to be interested in soft robotics pursuing research in soft robot sensing and perception. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Engineering Science Department and a member of Oxford Robotic Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K., where she has established the ORI Soft Robotics Laboratory. Her research interests are related to the development of new technological solutions for soft robot sensors and actuators and to investigating the role of “softness” in soft robot perception for achieving autonomy and intelligent behaviors."
Past Talks
ReachBot: Locomotion and Manipulation with Exceptional Reach
Prof. Dr. Mark R. Cutkosky (Stanford University)
March 2025
Insect-scale aerial robots driven by soft artificial muscles
Prof. Dr. Kevin Chen (MIT)
February 2025
From Quantity to Quality for 3D Perception
Prof. Dr. Angela Dai (TU Munich)
February 2025