ETH researcher takes a year off to build a drone that snatches other drones mid-air

DominiqueCAPaul · x · 2026-09-28

Janne is taking a year off from ETH to build an X-wing style drone that snatches other drones out of the sky. He's also joining Dream Machines part-time to work on next-gen grippers and hardware, all open source.

In the quoted tweet he shares this week's experiments with different TPU95 insert shapes for grippers: his favorite so far is the vertical/tilted ribs, where the TPU bends toward the middle when compressed and curls almost like a finger; the honeycomb version turned out too stiff. The problem statement stays the same: grab the thing, don't break it.

Original post →

More from Embodied

Embodied channel →