Moritz Kirchleitner

I come from mechanical engineering, and what drew me in was always mechanisms with many degrees of freedom — the question of how a lot of controlled motion can be packed into very little space.

That interest led me to robotic hands, actuators and humanoid systems. Dexterous robotic systems are interesting precisely because they combine mechanical complexity with a hard engineering constraint: the result still has to be compact, robust, controllable, and able to interact with the physical world.

My work so far has therefore been concentrated on mechanisms, robotic hardware, actuation, prototyping and testing — designing parts, building them, and then finding out on a test bench how they actually behave.

At ETH Zurich I am now extending that background toward control, software and learning-based robotics, so that I can work on the full system rather than only its mechanics.