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René Zurbrügg

Ph.D. Student
ETH Zürich
zrene (at) ethz.ch


About Me

I’m a Ph.D. student at the ETH AI Center and part of the Robotic Systems Lab (RSL) and Computer Vision and Geometry Group (CVG). My research interests lie in the intersection of robotics and computer vision, with a focus on manipulation and embodied AI. I am particularly interested in developing data-driven control algorithms that enable robots to learn complex manipulation tasks from raw sensory data. I am also interested in scene understanding and representation learning for robotic perception. I am advised by Prof. Marco Hutter and Prof. Marc Pollefeys.

Research Interests

Publications

    2026
  1. Image RA-L
    ELMP: Efficient Learning for Motion Planning via Analytical Policy Gradients
    Yixiao Li, Tifanny Portela, Jordis Herrmann, René Zurbrügg, Marco Hutter
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L, 2026)
    PDF

  2. Image IROS
    TactSpace: Learning a Physics-enriched Shared Latent Space for Tactile Sim-to-Real Transfer
    Arunim Joarder, Arjun Bhardwaj, René Zurbrügg, Mayank Mittal, Florin Püntener, Sira Bielefeldt, Cosmin Roman, Vaishakh Patil, Marco Hutter
    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS, 2026)
    PDF Project Page

  3. Image IROS
    VR-DAgger: Immersive VR for Dexterous Data Collection and Uncertainty-Guided On-Policy Correction
    René Zurbrügg, Tifanny Portela, Arjun Bhardwaj, Aravind Elanjimattathil Vijayan, Maximum Wilder-Smith, Marco Hutter
    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS, 2026)
    PDF

  4. Image CVPR
    FunFact: Building Probabilistic Functional 3D Scene Graphs via Factor-Graph Reasoning
    Zhengyu Fu, René Zurbrügg, Kaixian Qu, Marc Pollefeys, Marco Hutter, Hermann Blum, Zuria Bauer
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR, 2026)
    PDF Project Page

  5. Image RSS
    DexEvolve: Evolutionary Optimization for Robust and Diverse Dexterous Grasp Synthesis
    René Zurbrügg, Andrei Cramariuc, Marco Hutter
    Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS, 2026)
    PDF Project Page

  6. Image CVPR
    Hoi! -- A Multimodal Dataset for Force-Grounded, Cross-View Articulated Manipulation
    Tim Engelbracht, René Zurbrügg, Matteo Wohlrapp, Martin Büchner, Abhinav Valada, Marc Pollefeys, Hermann Blum, Zuria Bauer
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR, 2026)
    PDF Project Page

  7. Image RA-L
    A Pragmatist Robot: Learning to Plan Tasks by Experiencing the Real World
    Kaixian Qu, Guowei Lan, René Zurbrügg, Changan Chen, Christopher E. Mower, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Marco Hutter
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L, 2026)
    PDF Project Page

    8. 2025
  8. Image arXiv
    Isaac Lab: A GPU-Accelerated Simulation Framework for Multi-Modal Robot Learning
    Mayank Mittal, Pascal Roth, James Tigue, Antoine Richard, Octi Zhang, Peter Du, Antonio Serrano-Muñoz, Xinjie Yao, René Zurbrügg, et al.
    arXiv Preprint, 2025
    PDF Code

  9. Image CoRL
    GraspQP: Differentiable Optimization of Force Closure for Diverse and Robust Dexterous Grasping
    René Zurbrügg, Andrei Cramariuc, Marco Hutter
    Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL, 2025)
    PDF Code Project Page

  10. Image RA-L
    LLM-Handover: Exploiting LLMs for Task-Oriented Robot-Human Handovers
    Andreea Tulbure, René Zurbrügg, Timm Grigat, Marco Hutter
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L, 2025)
    PDF

  11. Image RA-L
    Lost & Found: Tracking Changes from Egocentric Observations in 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs
    Tjark Behrens, René Zurbrügg, Marc Pollefeys, Zuria Bauer, Hermann Blum
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L, 2025)
    PDF Project Page

  12. Image Humanoids
    SpotLight: Robotic Scene Understanding through Interaction and Affordance Detection
    Tim Engelbracht, René Zurbrügg, Marc Pollefeys, Hermann Blum, Zuria Bauer
    IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids, 2025)
    PDF Project Page

  13. Image TPAMI
    ACDC: The Adverse Conditions Dataset with Correspondences for Semantic Driving Perception
    Christos Sakaridis, Haoran Wang, Ke Li, René Zurbrügg, Arpit Jadon, Wim Abbeloos, Daniel Olmeda Reino, Luc Van Gool, Dengxin Dai
    IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI, 2025)
    PDF Project Page

    14. 2024
  14. Image ICRA
    ICGNet: A Unified Approach for Instance-Centric Grasping
    René Zurbrügg, Yifan Liu, Francis Engelmann, Suryansh Kumar, Marco Hutter, Vaishakh Patil, Fisher Yu
    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA, 2024)
    PDF Code Project Page

  15. Image IROS
    NARRATE: Versatile Language Architecture for Optimal Control in Robotics
    Seif Ismail, Antonio Arbues, Ryan Cotterell, René Zurbrügg, Carmen Amo Alonso
    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS, 2024)
    PDF Project Page

  16. Image ICRA WS
    Spot-Compose: A Framework for Open-Vocabulary Object Retrieval and Drawer Manipulation in Point Clouds
    Oliver Lemke, Zuria Bauer, René Zurbrügg, Marc Pollefeys, Francis Engelmann, Hermann Blum
    ICRA Workshop on 3D Visual Representations for Robot Manipulation (2024)
    PDF Project Page

    17. 2023
  17. Image ICRA
    Chronos and CRS: Design of a Miniature Car-Like Robot and a Software Framework for Single and Multi-Agent Robotics and Control
    Andrea Carron, Sabrina Bodmer, Lukas Vogel, René Zurbrügg, David Helm, Rahel Rickenbach, Simon Muntwiler, Jerome Sieber, Melanie N. Zeilinger
    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA, 2023)
    PDF Code BibTex

    18. 2022
  18. Image RA-L
    Embodied Active Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation via Informative Path Planning
    René Zurbrügg, Hermann Blum, Cesar Cadena, Roland Siegwart, Lukas Schmid
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L, 2022)
    PDF Code BibTex

    19. 2021
  19. Image CoRL
    Self-Improving Semantic Perception for Indoor Localisation
    Hermann Blum, Francesco Milano, René Zurbrügg, Roland Siegwart, Cesar Cadena, Abel Gawel
    Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL, 2021)
    PDF Code BibTex


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