zurich.tech

Events

4 of 4

23Oct
The Builders Run #6
An 8 km morning run with Daniel Stadelmann and Edo Treccani, followed by optional coffee.
UpcomingPartner
The Builders Run
Zürich
23Oct
Autoresearch Log #1
Maksym Andriushchenko (ELLIS Institute Tübingen) on automating LLM post-training, followed by paper discussions and demos.
UpcomingPartner
Autoresearch Log
J floor
29Oct
ZurichCV #15
Said Gürbüz (ETH Zurich) on controllable desktop environments for computer use agents, and Lorenzo Steno (Seldon Technologies) on building RL environments for computer use.
Upcoming
ZurichCV
ETH AI Center
115
3Nov
Tufa Talks #5
Dominique Paul (Dream Machines) on teaching robots manufacturing tasks through demonstration.
UpcomingPartner
Tufa Talks
Tufa Labs, Zurich

News

16 Oct

Stellar Alpina completes 150 rocket-engine hotfires

Stellar Alpina reports completing 150 rocket-engine hotfires across 23 configurations, exceeding its target of 100 tests over the summer. The Duebendorf propulsion company is developing rotating detonation rocket engines; the campaign follows the eight initial hotfires covered in its earlier funding announcement. The team deliberately pushed combustion chambers to failure to investigate design limits and collected measurements to guide subsequent iterations. It reports turnaround times as short as 30 minutes between some tests and shared footage of the campaign. These are ground-development tests, not flight qualification or an orbital demonstration.

Hardware Space

14 Oct

Bacteria bind 3D-printed sand into building components

ETH Zurich researchers developed a printable mixture of sand, bacteria and natural gels to make architectural elements, including a facade component. After printing, daily mineralisation baths let the bacteria form calcium carbonate crystals that bind the sand together. The material hardens at room temperature over two to five days, without firing it in a kiln. A second method uses a robotic arm to deposit sand, bacteria and mineralising substances in successive layers, demonstrated at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Neither approach is a ready replacement for structural concrete: load-bearing applications remain distant, and the sprayed material needs further mechanical testing. The reaction also produces environmentally harmful ammonium, so waste treatment must be addressed before claiming a sustainable alternative.

Materials Manufacturing

11 Oct

Robots copy walking styles from motion examples

Disney Research and ETH Zurich demonstrated a locomotion system that takes a movement-style example and a joystick velocity command as separate inputs. A style encoder conditions an autoregressive diffusion model, which generates reference motions for a reinforcement-learning controller to follow. The team demonstrated real-time control and continuous style changes in a simulated humanoid and on a physical robot. The method learns from unstructured motion recordings without explicit style labels and can reproduce styles not seen during training.

Robotics ML RL