Student Projects
Review the projects below and send an email to the project contact.
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
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ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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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
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.
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Semester Project , Master Thesis
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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
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Semester Project , Bachelor Thesis , Master Thesis
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Published since: 2026-03-26
Organization Research D'Andrea
Hosts Ramachandran Aswin
Topics Arts , Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology