Theses & Semester Projects
The Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control offers the following projects to ETH students:
- Studies on Mechatronics (SM)
- Bachelor Theses (BT)
- Semester Projects (SP)
- Master Theses (MT)
- You should read the ETH Citation Etiquette and working accordingly.
- For more information, read the ETH information on plagiarism.
- Furthermore, you are urged to use the Download IDSC Thesis Template (ZIP, 55.7 MB) to write your report.
How to apply:
- Please review the available projects below
- Send an email to the project contact.
Reliable and lifetime-sustainable electromobility systems: the case of fleet management
The project support the long-term vision of the co-design of societal complex systems, e.g., train fleet. This means concurrently optimizing the trains design, their control, and their deployment, in order to maximize the societal benefit. The present project represents the first step in this direction by focusing on the reliable and long-term sustainable management of a fleet of vehicles, which is still an open problem in literature.
Keywords
Stochastic optimization, degradation, sustainable deployment, fleet management
Labels
Semester Project , Bachelor Thesis , Master Thesis
PLEASE LOG IN TO SEE DESCRIPTION
More information
Published since: 2026-05-26 , Earliest start: 2026-06-01
Applications limited to EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , ETH Zurich
Organization Research Frazzoli
Hosts Fiaschi Lorenzo
Topics Mathematical Sciences , Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Control Systems Development for the CubliEvo (Evolution)
The Cubli, a research platform from ETH Zurich’s Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, balances on its corner, jumps up, and stabilizes itself using reaction wheels. Our goal is to release a fully open‐source “CubliEvo” by redesigning its mechatronic hardware, finalizing an embedded control system, and producing comprehensive documentation so that anyone can reproduce the platform.
Keywords
Embedded Control, Nonlinear Dynamics, State Estimator, Cascaded Controller, Mechatronic Validation, Open-Source Documentation
Labels
ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
Description
Goal
Contact Details
More information
Published since: 2026-05-14 , Earliest start: 2024-09-01
Organization Research D'Andrea
Hosts Ramachandran Aswin
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Fairness in transportation and control: We speak for the invisible players
The research proposal contributes to the final purpose of delivering a generalized welfarist framework able to address richer design problems and guide our approach to them. In particular, those application where preference aggregation needs to consider mutliple (potentially overlapping) groups of people having different time scales, and where non unique design solutions can co-exist, allowing to trade-off fairness, social benefit, and efficiency. It will also pave the way for further ethical and welfarist questions, such as how to select the design to actually implement within the optimal Pareto front. The research will be conducted within the federal project NCCR Automation.
Keywords
welfarist control, multi-objective optimization, transport systems, order theory, social choice theory
Labels
Collaboration , Master Thesis
PLEASE LOG IN TO SEE DESCRIPTION
More information
Published since: 2026-04-30 , Earliest start: 2026-06-15
Applications limited to ETH Zurich , EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Organization Research Frazzoli
Hosts Fiaschi Lorenzo
Topics Mathematical Sciences , Engineering and Technology
People-oriented design and control of societal complex systems: Welfarist Co-Design - Bring your own ethics
The research contributes to the long term goal of establishing the standard methodology for the design of complex systems of the future. The study will enable a theoretically grounded and numerically actionable framework through which address the emerging need of people-oriented (read welfarist) automation. Additionally, it will serve as a tool for assessing the proper representation of people preferences by analyzing their feedback about the resulting system that their encoded preferences would lead to. The research is framed within the federal project NCCR Automation
Keywords
welfarist control, monotone co-design, social choice theory, multi-objective optimization, order theory, infrastructure design
Labels
Collaboration , Master Thesis
PLEASE LOG IN TO SEE DESCRIPTION
More information
Published since: 2026-04-30 , Earliest start: 2026-06-15
Applications limited to ETH Zurich , EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Organization Research Frazzoli
Hosts Fiaschi Lorenzo
Topics Mathematical Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Strategic Interactions of Future Mobility Systems
Mobility is typically self-optimized for a particular region to accommodate internal travel needs. However, as soon as one considers multiple, interacting regions (e.g., urban areas interacting with agglomerations, and agglomerations interacting with rural areas), important coordination issues occur, including scheduling mismatches, fleet allocations, and congestion peaks. In short, a mobility system composed of self-optimized mobility systems seems to often operate suboptimally. In this project, we will investigate the idea of strategic interactions of future mobility stakeholders across heterogeneous regions, such as urban areas, agglomerations, and rural areas, leveraging techniques from network design, optimization, game theory, and policy making.
Keywords
Optimization, Game theory, Multi-agent interactions, Transportation systems, Robotics
Labels
Semester Project , Master Thesis
PLEASE LOG IN TO SEE DESCRIPTION
More information
Published since: 2026-04-28 , Earliest start: 2026-04-28 , Latest end: 2027-02-28
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Research Frazzoli
Hosts He Mingjia
Topics Mathematical Sciences , Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Scaling Urban Simulation with Machine Learning
Urban transport policy decisions, from congestion pricing to new transit lines, rely on agent-based simulation to forecast their impact before implementation. MATSim, one of the most widely adopted open-source frameworks for large-scale transport simulation, is used by city governments and research institutions worldwide to model the daily mobility of millions of agents and inform real policy decisions. However, at metropolitan scale, simulation runtimes remain a fundamental bottleneck, limiting the number of scenarios that planners can feasibly evaluate.
Keywords
MATSim, Agent-Based Simulation, Machine Learning, Data-Driven Optimisation, High-Performance Computing, Transport AI
Labels
Semester Project , Master Thesis
PLEASE LOG IN TO SEE DESCRIPTION
More information
Published since: 2026-04-28 , Earliest start: 2026-04-29 , Latest end: 2027-08-31
Organization Research Frazzoli
Hosts He Mingjia
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
SALAAD Beyond LLMs: Structured Sparse and Low-Rank Training for Multimodal Foundation Models
SALAAD is a structured training paradigm that introduces sparse and low-rank constraints during optimization to promote inherently compressible model representations without sacrificing task performance. While prior work has primarily focused on autoregressive language models, its applicability to broader model families remains unclear. In this project, we investigate whether SALAAD can generalize as a unified structured training framework across architectures and modalities, with a particular focus on multimodal foundation models such as vision-language and vision-language-action systems. These models introduce architectural heterogeneity and complex cross-modal interactions, posing new challenges for structured optimization. By combining insights from optimization, deep learning systems, and multimodal modeling, we aim to empirically and systematically evaluate the effectiveness of SALAAD in inducing compressible representations in such settings. Our findings seek to advance the understanding of structured training and its role in enabling efficient and elastic deployment of modern AI systems.
Keywords
Large Language Models, Foundation Models, Multimodal AI, Vision-Language Models, Vision-Language-Action Models, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, AI Systems, Representation Learning
Labels
Semester Project , Master Thesis , Other specific labels , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
Description
Goal
Contact Details
More information
Published since: 2026-04-07 , Earliest start: 2026-04-07 , Latest end: 2026-12-31
Organization Research Zeilinger
Hosts Ma Hao
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Teaching a robot to master a board game using Reinforcement Learning
Updated Project Description This project investigates how physical robots can achieve human-level performance in board games through Reinforcement Learning (RL). We use a custom 2D gantry robot integrated with ROS2 to play the dexterity-based game KLASK. Policies are trained in high-fidelity simulation—currently transitioning from NVIDIA Isaac Gym to Isaac Lab—to exploit GPU-parallel learning on RTX 4090 hardware. A central challenge is bridging the sim-to-real gap, addressed through an actuator policy model and extensive domain randomization. Self-play with opponent pools accelerates strategy discovery and improves robustness against human unpredictability. The system supports both human-vs-robot and robot-vs-robot configurations, enabling rapid fine-tuning of simulation-trained agents in the real world. Our ultimate objective is to develop an agent that consistently outperforms human players, demonstrating a complete pipeline from simulation to real-world dominance in a competitive board game setting. The project offers opportunities to refine hardware/software pipelines, explore advanced RL methods, and push the boundaries of sim-to-real transfer in physically interactive tasks.
Labels
Semester Project , Master Thesis
PLEASE LOG IN TO SEE DESCRIPTION
More information
Published since: 2026-03-26 , Earliest start: 2024-08-15
Organization Research D'Andrea
Hosts Ramachandran Aswin
Topics Engineering and Technology
The Way of Water: Development of a fleet of water-based drones for live performance
The Way of Water (wow.ethz.ch) fleet comprises 24 holonomic USVs, performing synchronized choreographies to music. Each vehicle is equipped with water fountains, RGB lighting, and mist generators, and utilizes a Fossen-based MPC with a multi-rate EKF (IMU + RTK-GPS) for tracking preplanned trajectories with ~5 cm accuracy. Time‐synced via GPS‐PPS, the swarm communicates over a hybrid Wi-Fi/4G network to broadcast real-time “trigger primitive” commands with <20 ms latency.
Keywords
Water based rovers, Electronics development, Distributed Robotics, Control Systems, Game design
Labels
Semester Project , Bachelor Thesis , Master Thesis
Description
Goal
Contact Details
More information
Published since: 2026-03-26
Organization Research D'Andrea
Hosts Ramachandran Aswin
Topics Arts , Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Automated Robotic Connection of Truck–Trailer Interfaces for Autonomous Trucks [Thesis with Industry]
The objective of this thesis is to design, implement, and evaluate a highly reliable and safe control system for a robotic arm that autonomously performs truck–trailer cable connection tasks. Three options of thesis are available: 1) a classical control-theoretic approach, or 2) a reinforcement learning–based approach, or 3) a hybrid method combining model-based control with learning, with the overarching requirement that the final system demonstrates industrial-grade robustness, safety, and repeatability.
Keywords
Robotic Arm, Classic Control, Reinforcement Learning
Labels
Master Thesis
Description
Goal
Contact Details
More information
Published since: 2026-02-20 , Earliest start: 2026-06-01
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Research Frazzoli
Hosts Fiaschi Lorenzo
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Parameter-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning for Tractor-Trailer Path Planning [Industry Thesis]
Develop a unified parameter-conditioned path-planning RL architecture capable of adapting its behavior to different tractor–trailer geometries, kinematic constraints, and user preferences without retraining.
Keywords
Reinforcement learning, flexible path planning, geometry and dynamics conditioning, Embotech, Industry Thesis
Labels
Master Thesis
Description
Goal
Contact Details
More information
Published since: 2026-01-13 , Earliest start: 2026-06-01
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Research Frazzoli
Hosts Fiaschi Lorenzo
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Direct Projects
The projects from Prof. Chris Onder's group are hosted on the student projects page.
The projects from Prof. Melanie Zeilinger's group are hosted on the student projects page.
Custom Projects
From time to time, project supervisors will develop custom student research projects to fit with a student's particular interests or skills.
If you are interested in doing a custom student research project, please email the project supervisor of your choice directly. We recommend that you carefully review their area of research before you contact them.
Please note that the decision of whether to develop a custom student project is at the full discretion of the project supervisor.