Erik Bauer

Hello there! I am a roboticist working on Embodied Intelligence at ETH Zurich. My research interests are in the intersection of robotics and machine learning, particularly in the area of manipulation.

Currently, I am finishing my master’s degree in robotics at ETH Zurich’s Soft Robotics Lab under the supervision of Prof. Katzschmann, Elvis Nava and Emanuele Palumbo. My thesis focuses on end-to-end learning of manipulation skills with latent action representations to facilitate skill transfer across different embodiments. To this end, I used techniques from imitation learning and multimodal learning for policy learning. I also wrote a teleoperation system for our lab’s humanoid robotic hand and a suite of data collection and management tools for training large-scale robotic policies.

During my bachelor’s degree, I started working on aerial manipulation at the Soft Robotics Lab. Our goal was to build a flying research platform to work on mobile manipulation in an aerial setting. Throughout the project, I contributed to the software systems, systems integration with hardware, onboard electrical architecture and the perception pipeline for self-localization with visual SLAM and segmentation-based target localization and grasp planning. We published our work at IROS 2022/2023 and CoRL 2024. In addition to presenting our work at IROS 2023 and CoRL 2024, I also had the pleasure of presenting at numerous local conferences in Switzerland, at the PX4 Developer Summit 2022 and at the IIT Bombay Techfest 2022.