Massimiliano Iaschi

My first passions were poetry and art. In my first years of high school, I used to spend entire summer afternoons in art museums, sometimes just to sit with a single painting. Through art I discovered Leonardo da Vinci; through Leonardo I discovered robotics; and through robotics I discovered my future.

I’m currently a visiting researcher at ETH Zürich’s Robotic Systems Lab (RSL) with Prof. Marco Hutter (through January 2026). I’m also a senior undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology, graduating in Mechanical Engineering in Spring 2026, with minors in Robotics and Biology/Bio-Inspired Design, and an undergraduate researcher in Prof. Daniel I. Goldman’s CRAB Lab since March 2023. Prior to joining Prof. Goldman's lab, I completed research internships at ETH Zürich’s Autonomous Systems Lab (Prof. Roland Siegwart, underwater robotics: Tethys project, Summer 2023) and at the University of Siena's SIRSLab (Prof. Domenico Prattichizzo, robotic haptics, Summer 2022).

Within my undergraduate research, my focus has been on robotics terrestrial locomotion, allowing me to gain experience in mechatronics and bio-inspired design, control systems design, physics-based modeling, and more recently robotics simulation and learning.

While in the CRAB Lab we use our robots as a tool to model experimentally the principles of their locomotion, my idea is to pursue my PhD in a lab that still works at the intersection of robotics, physics, and biology, but prioritizes building systems through rigorous engineering with the objective of not only advancing science through robotics, but especially of discovering solutions that could transform the state-of-the-art in exploratory/search-and-rescue/space robotics, where emphasis is given to the concept of co-designing mechanical and computational intelligence.

Terrestrial locomotion is what I mainly worked on so far, but aerial and aquatic locomotion interest me just as much. Specifically, I share the vision of my supervisor here at ETH, Dr. Robert Baines, of designing adaptive shape-morphing/multi-modal robots capable of adapting their morphology in real-time to successfully carry out their tasks across any terrain. Moreover, I am also interested in the biomedical applications of robotics, such as surgical robotics and bio-mechatronics.