Janne Stiefel - ETH Zürich
Mechanical Engineer working on Robotics.
Fifth semester at ETH Zürich. I'm part of the Focus Project CATCHY at the Mobile Robotics Lab, building a drone that catches other drones, secures them and brings them back to the ground safely. Meanwhile, I'm a working student at Dream Machines, developing hardware for robotics.
Learn more about my current work on X.
Location
Zürich, CH
Focus Project
CATCHY · ETH MRL
Work
Working student · Dream Machines
Updated
Oct 2026
Selected work
Projects.
CATCHY
An Interceptor Drone.
Our ETH Focus Project: a drone that catches unauthorised drones mid-air and brings them back intact, instead of jamming them or shooting them down.
DREAM GRIPPER
An Open-Source Robot Gripper.
A 3D-printable gripper for the DK1 arm: a rigid PLA-CF backbone with a soft TPU insert and grip tape. It picks up O-rings and still holds mugs, for under EUR 1 of material.
CRATER
A Mars Rover Drill.
Drill subsystem for ETH Zürich's first rover team. At the European Rover Challenge 2026 in Kraków, CRATER finished 12th of 25 as best newcomer, with full points in autonomous navigation.
ROCKY
A 3D-printed Quadruped.
Twelve servos across four legs, ESP32 motion control, and a Jetson Orin Nano running ROS2. v1 walked straight; on hold for now.
JEFF
An Autonomous Robot.
A small voice-controlled robot. Runs a local LLM, speech-to-text, and object detection on a Jetson Orin Nano. Motion control on Arduino.
NAUTIQ
A Mobile App for Sailors.
Mobile and web app for sailors and boat owners to post repair questions and share fixes. Built end-to-end on Expo and Supabase.
About
I'm in the fifth semester of my Mechanical Engineering bachelor at ETH Zürich. The Innovationsprojekt in my third semester — a team build where we designed and shipped a line-following robot that had to accomplish certain tasks within a time limit, in just a few months — got me into robotics, and I've been chasing projects ever since. I enjoy the software side as much as the mechanical work; most of what's on this site sits at that intersection.
More about me →Contact