ETH Zürich Robot Swings Across Monkey Bars Using Raw Lidar, No Terrain Map
lukas_m_ziegler · x · 2026-09-12
The robot from ETH Zürich's legged robotics lab jumped onto monkey bars, brachiated across, and dropped down to a stable landing.
Why standard approaches fail: most legged robots build terrain maps first, but a heightfield discards exactly the geometry that matters here—thin overhanging bars with air above and below.
Technical approach:
- The policy reads raw scans from a head-mounted solid-state lidar, with no reconstruction step
- An attention-based encoder picks out which sparse returns matter
- A GRU carries memory through the sequence, counting when a target bar slides out of the sensor's view
Training: a phase-scheduled teacher-student setup with separate privileged experts for jumping up, brachiating, and jumping down—each with its own curriculum—and a scheduler handing control between them.
More from Embodied
- Agility Robotics lost $138.1M in 2025 as Brett Adcock's doom prediction nears — Rewkang · 2026-10-31
- Promised the Year of Physical AI: Humanoid Robots Are Behind Schedule — Distinct-Question-16 · 2026-10-31
- PokeBot's RoboAPI brings the call-a-model pattern to robot arms, no task training needed — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-10-31
- Foundry Robotics raises $100M Series A to build factories that look like data centers — ishabytes · 2026-10-31
- NVIDIA's MotionBricks robotics motion-generation model trends on Hugging Face — nvidia · 2026-10-31
- Agility Robotics to raise $465M ahead of Nasdaq debut as AGLT on Nov 5, Foxconn leads with $201M — xmercury_one · 2026-10-31