Student Projects
Quadruped Glider Feasibility Study
Nature offers elegant examples of energy-efficient aerial locomotion through gliding animals such as flying squirrels and sugar gliders. Inspired by these creatures, this project explores the feasibility of a quadruped robot capable of transitioning from (wheeled-)legged locomotion to gliding flight. This study focuses on a practical first step: mounting a deployable wing on top of a quadruped robot, such as the Unitree Go2. The robot would walk or climb to an elevated launch point, deploy its glider, and perform a controlled passive glide. This opens the door for future hybrid locomotion platforms capable of efficiently navigating both rough ground and long aerial descents. The student(s) will evaluate aerodynamic feasibility through glider performance modeling (e.g., glide ratio, sink rate, stall speed), simulate integration with a quadruped platform, and explore deployment and stability challenges. If viable, preliminary hardware evaluations using off-the-shelf components could be considered. The project also leaves room for long-term vision: future iterations may investigate more integrated, bioinspired control surfaces, should the base platform prove successful, such as membranes between limbs. When done as a two-person project, one student can focus on flight dynamics and aerodynamic simulation, while the other focuses on mechanical integration and physical feasibility. The long-term goal is to assess whether a high-fidelity real-world prototype could be achievable and valuable in robotic exploration or rescue operations.
Keywords
Quadruped Locomotion, Fixed-Wing Flight, Bioinspired Robotics, Passive Gliding, Deployable Wings, Hybrid Mobility, Simulation, Robot Design
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Semester Project , Bachelor Thesis , Master Thesis
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Published since: 2025-07-10
Organization Robotic Systems Lab
Hosts Fischer Oliver , Klemm Victor , Rohr David
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Continuous-Time Multi-Sensor Odometry in the Wild
This project provides the opportunity for an academic exchange with the Vision for Robotics Lab (V4RL) at the University of Cyprus (UCY). Led by Prof. Margarita Chli, the lab has recently won a prestigious ERC grant for the “SkEyes” project, to advance robotic perception for drone swarms and bridging our research activities between ETH Zurich and the University of Cyprus. This master project is offered as part of this research effort.
Keywords
Continuous-Time Odometry, Sensor Fusion
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Semester Project , Master Thesis
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Published since: 2025-07-09 , Earliest start: 2025-07-01 , Latest end: 2026-03-31
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Autonomous Systems Lab
Hosts Mascaro Rubén
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences
Versatile, Robust and Simulatable Multi-Robot SLAM
This project provides the opportunity for an academic exchange with the Vision for Robotics Lab (V4RL) at the University of Cyprus (UCY). Led by Prof. Margarita Chli, the lab has recently won a prestigious ERC grant for the “SkEyes” project, to advance robotic perception for drone swarms and bridging our research activities between ETH Zurich and the University of Cyprus. This master project is offered as part of this research effort.
Keywords
Multi-Robot SLAM
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Semester Project , Master Thesis
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Published since: 2025-07-07 , Earliest start: 2025-07-01 , Latest end: 2026-03-31
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Autonomous Systems Lab
Hosts Mascaro Rubén
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences
Bridging Human-Readable and Robot-Perceived Maps: CAD-SLAM Alignment and Refinement
This thesis proposes an industrial collaboration with Sevensense Robotics on enabling robots to take advantage of existing building models for their localization and navigation, by aligning the output of the robot's visual SLAM map to CAD models. This will be an exciting opportunity to push the state of the art in research and also in practical applied demonstrations on real robots.
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Master Thesis , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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Published since: 2025-07-01
Organization Autonomous Systems Lab
Hosts Oleynikova Elena
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
LiDAR-Visual-Inertial Odometry with a Unified Representation
Lidar-Visual-Inertial odometry approaches [1-3] aim to overcome the limitations of the individual sensing modalities by estimating a pose from heterogenous measurements. Lidar-inertial odometry often diverges in environments with degenerate geometric structures and visual-inertial odometry can diverge in environments with uniform texture. Many existing lidar-visual-inertial odometry approaches use independent lidar-inertial and visual-inertial pipelines [2-3] to compute odometry estimates that are combined in a joint optimisation to obtain a single pose estimate. These approaches are able to obtain a robust pose estimate in degenerate environments but often underperform lidar-inertial or visual-inertial methods in non-degenerate scenarios due to the complexity of maintaining and combining odometry estimates from multiple representations.
Keywords
Odometry, SLAM, Sensor Fusion
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Semester Project , Master Thesis
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Published since: 2025-07-01 , Earliest start: 2025-07-01 , Latest end: 2026-02-28
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Autonomous Systems Lab
Hosts Mascaro Rubén , Chli Margarita
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences
Collision Avoidance - Master Thesis at Avientus
Avientus is a startup that specializes in developing cutting-edge, heavy-duty automated drone transportation systems designed to revolutionize logistics and industrial applications. To further enhance the safety and reliability of their drones, we are offering a Master Thesis opportunity in the field of collision avoidance for drones.
Keywords
Collision avoidance, Computer vision, Drones
Labels
Master Thesis
Description
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Published since: 2025-07-01 , Earliest start: 2025-08-01 , Latest end: 2026-02-28
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Autonomous Systems Lab
Hosts Mascaro Rubén , Chli Margarita
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences
Note on plagiarism
We would like to suggest every student, irrespective of the type of project (Bachelor, Semester, Master, ...), to make himself/herself familiar with ETH rules regarding plagiarism