Katzschmann and Siegwart receive Amazon Research Awards
For the topics of “Design and Control Optimization of Soft Gripper Mechanisms for Manipulation” and “Autonomous Navigation of Aerial Robotic Manipulators in Unstructured Indoor and Outdoor Environments”, respectively, the Professors Robert Katzschmann and Roland Siegwart receive Amazon Research Awards.
The Amazon Research Award provides unrestricted funds to support the work of one to two doctoral students or postdoctoral students for one year under the supervision of a faculty member. Further, recipients receive access to more than 300 Amazon public datasets, and can utilize AWS AI/ML services and tools.
At the Autonomous Systems Laboratory of Professor Roland Siegwart, Rik Bähnemann and Michael Pantic will investigate how aerial robots can navigate in confined spaces to perform maintenance tasks. They received funding of 80,000 USD in cash and an additional 20,000 USD in AWS credits. At Professor Robert Katzschmann’s Soft Robotics Lab the fund of 99,026 USD will support the work of Mike Yan Michelis and Yasunori Toshimitsu. The two doctoral students investigate how soft robotic grippers can be computationally improved for robot manipulation tasks by applying gradient-based optimization on the design and control of soft gripper mechanisms.
Both laboratories are part of the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering of ETH Zurich. The two awards are given for the Fall 2021 call for proposals.
