100%, Zurich, fixed-term

The Soft Robotics Lab within the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich is inviting applications for several open postdoctoral positions. Our lab's goal is to build, model, and control robots in a fundamentally different way, so that they become more flexible, dexterous, capable, and adapt better to their environment. We work along four directions: soft and musculoskeletal robotics, biohybrid living systems, dexterous manipulation and robot learning, and simulation for embodied AI. We are looking for exceptional candidates in any of them. This round we especially want two profiles: people who design and build the robots, and people who make policies run on them.

We do not hire against a narrow project description. We hire people who will define their own. Tell us which of our directions you want to push, and why you are the person to push it.

Today's robots are mostly rigid, fragile, and a world apart from the agility and resilience of biological bodies. Our bet is that the next generation of robots will be soft, musculoskeletal, and in part alive. They will be built to make contact with the real world rather than to avoid it. We pursue this across four directions, and a strong candidate will find a home in one of them and borrow from the others.

Soft and musculoskeletal robotics. We build bodies from compliant structures, bones, joints, and tendon-like actuation. Our electrohydraulic musculoskeletal leg jumps, moves fast, and adapts to terrain at roughly 1.2% of the energy a motor-driven leg needs (Nature Communications, 2024 ). Our low-voltage HASEL actuators run near 1100 V, are safe to touch, and work untethered and underwater (Science Advances, 2024 ). We recently extended these muscles to full antagonistic motion ranges (ICRA 2025 ) and to a sensorless, inherently compliant anthropomorphic hand driven entirely by electrohydraulic actuation (IROS 2026 ).

Biohybrid living systems. We grow engineered muscle and use it to actuate machines. We bioprinted multicellular muscle-tendon units that transmit force along a real musculoskeletal path (Science Advances, 2025 ), embedded sensors directly into muscle for closed-loop control of proprioceptive biohybrid robots (Advanced Intelligent Systems, 2025 ), and established functional volumetric bioprinting with xolography (Advanced Materials, 2026 ). Co-optimized volumetric muscle designs for large dynamic deformations are in press at Nature Communications (Balciunaite et al., 2026). The same fabrication line reaches clinical work: with University Hospital Zurich we printed implantable reinforced cardiac tissue patches (Advanced Materials, 2025 ).

Dexterous manipulation and robot learning. We build hands and the policies that run them. One of our initial hand designs is now commercialized through our spin-off Mimic Robotics . ORCA is our open-source, reliable, and cost-effective anthropomorphic hand for uninterrupted dexterous task learning (IROS 2025 ). On that hardware we work on imitation learning and diffusion policies, cross-embodiment skill transfer through latent action diffusion (ICRA 2026), sample-efficient reinforcement learning and policy fine-tuning directly on the real robot , vision-language-action models for contact-rich tasks, and tactile representation learning on our high-resolution sensorized skin (ICRA 2024). We also build controllable dexterous world models for training and evaluation, and a benchmark of dexterity for anthropomorphic hands . Whichever side you come from, the offer is the same: the hand, the skin, the simulator, and the people who designed all three sit in one room. Build a mechanism here and someone will have a policy running on it within weeks. Build a policy here and you can change the mechanism when the mechanism is what is wrong.

Simulation, fabrication, and embodied AI. Building these robots requires tools that did not exist. Vision-Controlled Jetting prints rigid skeletons, soft tissue, tendons, and sensors in one pass, including a full musculoskeletal hand and forearm (Nature, 2023 ). We close the sim-to-real gap with learned residual physics (RA-L, 2024, Best Paper Award ), and we released SORS , a modular high-fidelity soft-robot simulator, at RoboSoft 2026.

Underwater and aerial systems run through all of this, from SoFi and tendon-driven swimmer digital twins to our open-source soft aerial manipulation platform (CoRL 2024 ).

• Support to become independent: we help you write your own funding (SNSF Ambizione and Postdoc.Mobility, ERC Starting Grant, Marie Skłodowska-Curie), we send you to the venues that matter, and we back you when you go for a faculty position or found a company. Alumni of the lab have done both
• A world-class lab with state-of-the-art fabrication and test facilities: in-house multi-material 3D printing, a machine shop, an electronics lab, our own biological laboratories, over 20 dexterous robotic hands and 12 robot arms for real-world data collection and teleoperation, high-resolution tactile skins, and a dedicated GPU cluster with eight NVIDIA H200 GPUs alongside access to ETH's central compute and the Alps supercomputer at CSCS
• A multidisciplinary team of mechanical engineers, materials scientists, biologists, and machine learning researchers, embedded in the broader robotics ecosystem at ETH Zurich
• Strong ties to industry and to our spin-offs, and support for turning your research into something that leaves the lab
• Your job with impact: become part of ETH Zurich, which not only supports your professional development, but also actively contributes to positive change in society
• You can expect numerous benefits , such as public transport season tickets and car sharing, a wide range of sports offered by the ASVZ , childcare and attractive pension benefits
• An initial one-year contract, renewed annually, on the ETH Zurich postdoctoral salary scale

In line with

our values

, ETH Zurich encourages an inclusive culture. We promote equality of opportunity, value diversity and nurture a working and learning environment in which the rights and dignity of all our staff and students are respected. Visit our

Equal Opportunities and Diversity website

to find out how we ensure a fair and open environment that allows everyone to grow and flourish. Sustainability is a core value for us – we are consistently working towards a

climate-neutral future

.

Curious? So are we.

We look forward to receiving your online application with the following documents as a single merged PDF document, ideally under 10 MB and no larger than 40 MB, titled with your last name and initials as well as the application date (for example, 20260901_DoeJane_application) in the following order:

• Cover letter addressed to Prof. Robert Katzschmann, describing your research achievements, the direction you want to pursue with us, and why. One to two pages
• Detailed CV, including a list of publications and your final grade for each degree with the local grading scale
• Names and contact information of at least three references. Reference letters are optional
• Two or three representative publications, or your thesis

Please upload one PDF only, not several separate files.

Further information about our group can be found on our website . Questions regarding the position should be directed to Federica Poltronieri, [email protected] (no applications).

Please note that we exclusively accept applications submitted through our online application portal. Applications via email or postal services will not be considered.

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis until November 30, 2026. We have several postdoctoral positions to fill in the coming months. Start date by agreement.

We aim to respond within three weeks. The process has three steps: a first interview and a technical deep dive, both online, and finally a lab visit in Zurich.

We are also hiring doctoral researchers .

About ETH Zürich

ETH Zurich is one of the world’s leading universities specialising in science and technology. We are renowned for our excellent education, cutting-edge fundamental research and direct transfer of new knowledge into society. Over 30,000 people from more than 120 countries find our university to be a place that promotes independent thinking and an environment that inspires excellence. Located in the heart of Europe, yet forging connections all over the world, we work together to develop solutions for the global challenges of today and tomorrow.