The Sensing, Interaction & Perception Lab at ETH Zürich offers a fully funded PhD position at the intersection of robotics, wearable sensing, signal processing, machine learning, and human-computer interaction. The project aims to develop neuromotor interfaces for dexterous robot teleoperation using surface electromyography (sEMG) and egocentric vision, enabling systems that understand both user intent and environmental context. The research will focus on computational and sensing methods to make these systems robust, generalizable, and effective in real interactive settings, with applications in Mixed Reality and other interactive systems.
Tasks
- Develop signal-processing and machine-learning methods for multichannel EMG, including discrete and continuous decoding of hand and finger activity.
- Develop egocentric computer-vision methods for understanding hands, objects, hand–object interactions, contacts, affordances, and task state.
- Develop multimodal learning and reasoning methods that combine EMG with egocentric vision to infer motor intent and interaction context.
- Investigate reasoning over objects, actions, interaction sequences, and task state to resolve ambiguous motor signals and anticipate intended actions.
- Apply methods to dexterous robot teleoperation, including mapping human motor intent to robot manipulators and dexterous hands.
- Optionally: Prototype wearable sensing systems, including electrode configurations, signal acquisition, embedded processing, and hardware and software integration.
- Develop and evaluate applications in robotics, Mixed Reality, and other interactive systems.
- Disseminate findings in publications at top-tier venues and open-source research results and tools where appropriate.
- Present research findings at academic conferences, workshops, and seminars.
Requirements
- Written and spoken fluency in English.
- An excellent master's degree (MSc., M.Eng. or equivalent) in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
- A strong foundation in machine learning, including classification and regression, model evaluation, representation learning, and generalization.
- A solid understanding of signals and time-series data (e.g., sampling, frequency, phase, noise, spectral representations, and filtering).
- Strong programming skills and experience implementing and quantitatively evaluating computational methods.
- An interest in building real-time sensing and interactive systems, including experimentation with physical sensors.
- A background in one or more of the following areas is particularly beneficial:
- Electrical engineering and signal processing: EMG or other electrophysiological signals, sensor systems, embedded systems, electronics, or wearable sensing.
- Robotics: manipulation, dexterous manipulation, teleoperation, robot learning, shared autonomy, or human-robot interaction.
- Computer Vision: egocentric vision, hand and object pose estimation, hand–object interaction, contact and affordance estimation, video understanding, or action recognition.
- Machine learning: temporal modeling, representation learning, multimodal learning, multimodal reasoning, domain adaptation, or learning from noisy sensor data.
- Interactive systems: HCI, Mixed Reality, wearable computing, or real-time input systems.
- Experience with prototyping sensing systems (embedded systems, signal acquisition, processing, PCBs) is particularly beneficial.
Benefits
- Exciting research environment and team at ETH Zürich.
- Opportunity to develop complete research systems spanning wearable sensing, egocentric perception, machine learning, and robotic interaction.
- Collaboration with internationally recognized research groups in robotics, machine learning, computer vision, interactive systems, and Mixed Reality.
- Opportunities to contribute to and collaborate with the ETH AI Center and ETHAR, ETH's Research Hub for Augmented Reality in collaboration with Google XR.
- Access to infrastructure for wearable and embedded prototyping, egocentric sensing, interactive systems, and robotic manipulation.
- Support for publication and presentation at leading international conferences and journals.
- Encouragement of intellectual independence and technically ambitious research.
- Inclusive culture that promotes equality of opportunity, values diversity, and nurtures a respectful working and learning environment.
- Commitment to sustainability and working towards a climate-neutral future.
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Über uns
Das Team
The Sensing, Interaction & Perception Lab is part of the Institute of Intelligent Interactive Systems within the Department of Computer Science. The team frequently collaborates with other groups, departments, institutions, and companies in Switzerland and abroad.