JoLau stands for Jonas Lauener, a roboticist born in 1995 and living in Switzerland. Already as a child, I dreamt of building robots. During my middle school, I was part of a robotics club, where we participated in First Lego League (FLL) tournaments with our Lego Mindstorms robots – in 2010, we even went to Istanbul to the European championship.
Instead of just doing high school, I decided to do an apprenticeship as an application developer from 2010 to 2014. I had the privilege to train at the computer science institutes IMVS and i4Ds of the University of Applied Sciences FHNW. After my apprenticeship, I continued working at the institute i4Ds, FHNW to develop IRE, a moved reality system for the Oculus Rift. After the great success of that project, I had the chance to work for five months in Singapore as a research assistant at the Future Cities Lab of ETH. There, I developed the WeatherTimelapse.
Before I could start my bachelor’s in mechanical engineering at ETH Zurich, I had to do an extra year of school called Passerelle, with exams at the end to upgrade my degree to one of high school. From 2016 to 2019, I earned my bachelor’s in mechanical engineering at ETH Zurich. During my last year, I was part of the VariLeg enhanced team, where we developed an exoskeleton to help people with paraplegia walk again. After my bachelor’s, I interned at the drone company Wingtra in Zurich. From 2020 to 2023, I did my Master’s in Robotics, Systems, and Control at ETH Zurich.
Besides work projects, I love to work on my personal projects, like building furniture or improving my home automation system. Whenever possible, I go for road cycling.
