Environmental Robotics Lab ¶

Head: Prof. Dr. Stefano Mintchev

We are a motivated and creative team of roboticists affiliated with ETH and WSL. Our research goal is to push robots out of their comfort zone. We therefore develop versatile and adaptable robots to explore challenging natural environments rather than robots to execute tasks with precision and repeatability in simple and predictable indoor settings. On the one hand, this is an opportunity to study new and exciting locomotion, perception, and control strategies to obtain rich sensory and motor skills to operate in unknown and unpredictable environments. On the other hand, our robots provide concrete solutions to some of the United Nations Social Development Goals (UN SDGs) by finding uses in environmental monitoring, disaster mitigation, and precision agriculture.

The teaching efforts of our group comprises student projects (semester projects and thesis work) and courses at the intersection of robotics, agricultural and environmental sciences.