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This repository is here to orient the students who conduct a project (Studies on Mechatronics, Seminar CSE in Robotics, Bachelor-, Semester-, and Master Theses) at the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) at ETH Zurich. It contains general information, guidelines, templates and helpful links.
You can download all files and templates as a ZIP-file here.
This page contains the general information and overview of a student projects. Information to specific topics are given on the following pages:
Bachelor and Semester projects last 14 weeks starting at the first day of the semester and end at the end of the semester. Master projects last 6 months and the starting date is agreed on with the supervisor.
Please provide your supervisor a work schedule within two weeks after the start of the project.
You will agree with your supervisor on a weekly meeting. The meeting is meant to answer your questions and to check your progress. It is helpful for you to prepare these meetings with the coordination sheet provided in this repository in Coordination report/.
Scientific publications can be found on websites such as
Make sure to access these website from within the ETH network or use VPN. This gives you access to download full PDF files from many publishers.
Use the bibliographies and the cited by functions to find related publications.
For the organization of your references, we recommend using Mendeley, a free and cross-platform reference management software. As a handy feature, Mendeley can automatically build your BibTeX files. Make sure to follow these instructions to access additional features.
An alternative to Mendeley is Zotero, "a free-to-use, platform-independent and cloud-based reference management software program". As a member of ETH Zurich you have unlimited storage space.
An informal intermediate presentation (no intermediate presentation for Studies on Mechatronics) about your work will take place around mid-term. The goal of the presentation/discussion is to give a brief summary of the work done, to propose a plan for the continuation of the project, and to discuss the main directions of the project. More specifically, the intermediate presentation:
- is not public, i.e. is only attended by the student, the 1-2 supervisors and Prof. Siegwart
- is rather a discussion than a presentation. Be prepared to be interrupted or asked questions while you present your work.
- takes 8-10 minutes
- does not necessarily require the use of slides. However, most students prepare ca. 5 slides (e.g. showing 1) Motivation, 2) Approach, 3) Work done so far and first results 4) current challenges 5) schedule and future work). Focus on the overall concepts rather than too many details when you discuss your work.
The final presentation will take place at the end of the project. A test run is presented to and discussed with the supervisors 2–5 days before the public final presentation.
Exact dates and times for the intermediate and final presentations will be arranged by the lab administration.
The duration of the final presentations are
- Studies on Mechatronics (SoM) and Seminar Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) in Robotics: 10 minutes presentation, 5 minutes questions / discussion.
- Bachelor and Semester projects: 15 minutes presentation, 5 minutes questions / discussion,
- Bachelor Project with integrated SoM: 22 minutes presentation, 8 minutes questions / discussion,
- Master projects: 20 minutes presentation, 10 minutes questions / discussion,
The presentation is evaluated based on the final public presentation.
For the slides, we recommend using the template as it is provided in this repository in Presentation/. Further information on the ETH Zurich templates is given here.
A report has to be handed in to the responsible supervisor. The report has to describe the full work performed during the entire project. A preliminary version has to be handed in per e-mail or printed one week after the final presentation or as determined with the supervisor. The preliminary version of the report is discussed with the supervisor. The report is evaluated based on the preliminary version with the requirement that the remarks are incorporated in the final report.
We recommend using the LaTeX template as it is provided in this repository in Report/. Information on the usage of LaTeX is given in Manuals/The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2E.pdf. Also, make sure to be familiar with the style guide described in Manuals/LaTeX Style Guide.pdf.
An online lecture on how to write a report can be found here.
Every student has to make himself/herself familiar with the ETH Zurich rules regarding plagiarism.
You will be evaluated according to the ASL evaluation sheet. For Bachelor, Semester, and Master Theses, the grade consists of
- 40% General (Commitment, Methodology, Autonomy, Theory etc.),
- 20% Implementation,
- 20% Report,
- 20% Presentation .
For Studies on Mechatronics and Seminar CSE in Robotics the grade consists of
- 40% General (Commitment, Methodology, Autonomy, Theory etc.),
- 30% Report,
- 30% Presentation.
After you have revised your report based on the supervisors comments, please prepare a folder with the following contents:
- Final report as PDF and as LaTeX source code,
- Presentation as source file (e.g. PowerPoint) and as PDF,
- All files (CAD, MATLAB, code etc.) used or created during the project.
Please provide a copy of the folder via shared folder (e.g. polybox) or USB drive to each supervisor and make sure to put the name of the project, your name and the semester on the label. The supervisor might also ask you to print and bind your report, but this is usually not necessary.
Finally, you have to hand in the folder together with the printed title page and the signed Declaration of Originality to the secretary.
In most cases, we recommend publishing your thesis on the ETH Research Collection as a publicly available record. This will allow researchers from around the world to search for, read and cite your work. There are some cases where this may not be possible, such as when commercially-valuable content is included, so please discuss with your supervisors. In either case, you can find more information about the research collection here. At the same location, you will find a form that you can fill out and sign, then hand to your supervisor to sign to allow upload of your thesis to the research collection.