ETH Competence Center - Competence Center for Rehabilitation Engineering and Science (RESC)| Acronym | RESC | | Homepage | https://resc.ethz.ch/ | | Country | Switzerland | | ZIP, City | | | Address | | | Phone | | | Type | Academy | | Parent organization | ETH Zurich | | Current organization | ETH Competence Center - Competence Center for Rehabilitation Engineering and Science (RESC) | | Child organizations | | | Members | |
Open OpportunitiesRobots have become increasingly advanced recently, capable of performing challenging tasks such as taking elevators and cooking shrimp. Moreover, their ability to accomplish long-horizon tasks given simple natural language instructions is also made possible by large language models. However, with this increased functionality comes the risk that intelligent robots might unintentionally or intentionally harm people based on instructions from an operator. On the other hand, significant efforts have been made to restrain large language models from generating harmful content. Can these efforts be applied to robotics to ensure safe interactions between robots and humans, even as robots become more capable? This project aims to answer this question.
- Engineering and Technology, Information, Computing and Communication Sciences
- Master Thesis, Semester Project
| The goal of this project is to apply LLMs to teach the ANYmal robot new low-level skills via Reinforcement Learning (RL) that the task planner identifies to be missing. - Intelligent Robotics
- Master Thesis
| Organs-on-Chip (OoC) replicate human organs in vitro but often lack physiological perfusion profiles. This project aims to develop a compact robotic XY stage for integration with OoC perfusion systems, enhancing automation and precision. By improving compatibility and mimicking dynamic blood flow, this innovation advances research and pharmaceutical applications. - Biomedical Engineering
- Master Thesis
| Robots may not be able to complete tasks fully autonomously in unstructured or unseen environments, however direct teleoperation from human operators may also be challenging due to the difficulty of providing full situational awareness to the operator as well as degradation in communication leading to the loss of control authority. This motivates the use of shared autonomy for assisting the operator thereby enhancing the performance during the task.
In this project, we aim to develop a shared autonomy framework for teleoperation of manipulator arms, to assist non-expert users or in the presence of degraded communication. Imitation learning, such as diffusion models, have emerged as a popular and scalable approach for learning manipulation tasks [1, 2]. Additionally, recent works have combined this with partial diffusion to enable shared autonomy [3]. However, the tasks were restricted to simple 2D domains. In this project, we wish to extend previous work in the lab using diffusion-based imitation learning, to enable shared autonomy for non-expert users to complete unseen tasks or in degraded communication environments.
- Intelligent Robotics, Robotics and Mechatronics
- ETH Zurich (ETHZ), Semester Project
| Human intention drives goal-directed actions, requiring decomposition into hierarchical instructions, from abstract strategies to concrete interactions. Robotics seeks to automate these instructions, but challenges arise in domains like neurorehabilitation, where complex human-robot interactions introduce inefficiencies from incomplete automation, diverse user preferences for strategies, and difficulties to engage with technical parameters.
This thesis will explore shared instruction space characteristics across robotic domains, focusing on bottlenecks in automating high-level instructions. Novel metrics will be developed that define and classify instruction layers, strategies, and requirements. - Intelligent Robotics
- Bachelor Thesis
| Proprioception, often called the "sixth sense," is vital for coordinating movements and maintaining balance, especially in the hands and fingers. In neurological patients, impaired proprioception in the upper limbs can hinder daily tasks and reduce quality of life. Traditional rehabilitation often lacks the intensity and precision needed for optimal recovery of fine motor skills.
This project leverages high-dosage training with the ETH MIKE, a validated one-degree-of-freedom robotic device designed for precise, repetitive movements to enhance proprioception and motor function. By promoting neuroplasticity and functional recovery, this research aims to advance rehabilitation practices. Participants will gain hands-on clinical experience, train with neurological patients, and collaborate with therapists, engineers, and researchers. - Biomedical Engineering, Clinical Sciences, Human Movement and Sports Science, Medicine-general, Neurosciences, Other
- Bachelor Thesis, Internship, Master Thesis, Semester Project
| In this project, we focus on continuous and quantitative monitoring of activities of daily living (ADL) in SCI individuals with the goal of identifying cardiovascular events and PI-related risk behaviors.
ADLs specific to SCI patients and their lifestyles shall be discussed and narrowed down in the scope of this work, therefore an autonomous camera-based system is proposed to classify ADLs.
The Current work builds on a previous project where a SlowFast network [1] was trained to identify SCI-specific classes and we aim to further improve the classification and temporal resolution for transferring to wearables' time-series data. - Computer Vision, Health Information Systems (incl. Surveillance), Intelligent Robotics, Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Genetic Alogrithms and Fuzzy Logic, Pattern Recognition
- Bachelor Thesis, Course Project, ETH for Development (ETH4D) (ETHZ), ETH Zurich (ETHZ), Internship, Master Thesis, Semester Project
| This hands-on work (internship or semester project) within a clinical setting will bring you close to intelligent health management while exploring multiple data systems. You will experience multimodal data of robotics rehabilitation, general clinical practice, and detailed clinical studies applied in classification and dimensionality reduction. - Biomechanics, Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, Computer-Human Interaction, Engineering and Technology, Expert Systems, Information Systems Development Methodologies, Information Systems Management, Intelligent Robotics, Interfaces and Presentation, Medicine-general, Neural Networks, Genetic Alogrithms and Fuzzy Logic, Operating Systems, Pattern Recognition, Programming Techniques, Rehabilitation and Therapy: Occupational and Physical, Sensory Systems, Signal Processing, Simulation and Modelling, Software Engineering, Sports Medicine, Virtual Reality and Related Simulation
- Bachelor Thesis, ETH Zurich (ETHZ), Internship, Lab Practice, Master Thesis, Other specific labels, Semester Project
| Modern wearable and nearable sensors allow for continuous 24-hour health monitoring. In clinical settings, such a richness of data is highly desirable to closely monitor the health status of patients, however, often not exploited due to the lack of common interfaces and the overall complexity of integrating the devices into the clinical routine. Moreover, future treatment devices could benefit from interfacing with these sensors through a common interface to perform closed-loop interventions.
In this project, you will develop a novel time-series online synchronization and communication agent adaptable to data changes for interfacing wearable, nearable sensors data with robots in an intelligent system.
Together with a research team in Japan, this work will be implemented at several clinical settings. - Biomedical Engineering, Biosensor Technologies, Computer-Human Interaction, Conceptual Modelling, Data Structures, Digital Systems, Engineering/Technology Instrumentation, Information Storage, Retrieval and Management, Intelligent Robotics, Medical and Health Sciences, Operating Systems, Signal Processing, Software Engineering
- Bachelor Thesis, Collaboration, ETH Zurich (ETHZ), Internship, Master Thesis, Semester Project
| The GELLO system proposed in [1] is a low-cost “puppet” robot arm that is used to teleoperate a larger, main robot arm. This project aims to adapt this open source design to enable teleoperation of the DynaArm, which is a robot manipulator arm custom designed by the Robotic Systems Lab to be mounted on the ANYmal quadruped platform. Such a system provides a simplification over the existing DynaArm teleoperation interface consisting of a second identical DynaArm used purely as a human interface device [2], which may be an unnecessarily expensive and cumbersome solution. The system developed may have applications in remote teleoperation for industrial inspection or disaster response scenarios, as well as providing an interface for training imitation learning models, which may optionally be explored as time permits.
[1] Wu, Philip et al. "GELLO: A General, Low-Cost, and Intuitive Teleoperation Framework for Robot Manipulators". arXiv preprint (2024)
[2] Fuchioka, Yuni et al. AIRA Challenge: Teleoperated Mobile Manipulation for Industrial Inspection. Youtube Video. (2024) - Intelligent Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics and Mechatronics, Simulation and Modelling
- Bachelor Thesis, Master Thesis, Semester Project
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