Skip to content
Active Fluid Control

Team

Meet the people behind Active Fluid Control. The team spans reinforcement learning, control theory, fluid dynamics, and hardware and software engineering — united by the curiosity of pushing the boundaries of active fluid control in the physical world.

Lead researchers.

  • Antonio Terpin
    PhD researcher — research design, hardware, software, theory · ETH Zürich
    homepage github email
  • Raffaello D'Andrea
    Principal investigator · ETH Zürich
    homepage

Additional participants.

  • Dani Wagner
    • 2024–
      Lab technician (manufacturing)
  • Matthias Muller
    • 2024–
      Lab technician (electrical design)
  • Fabian Weber
    • 2025–
      Research assistant
      • Hardware V1 mechanical design
      • Automatic particle seeder mechanical design
      • Hardware LED illumination
      • Assembly guides
    • 2025 · Master thesis Completed Publication in progress
      Design improvement and realization of a tabletop water channel
      Supervised by A. Terpin
  • Alan Bonomi
    • 2026 · Semester project Completed Publication in progress
      FlowGames: software stack for adversarial fluid control
      Supervised by A. Terpin
    • 2025 · Class project Completed PIV-ADMM
      ADMM for PIV refinement
      Supervised by A. Terpin
    • 2025 · Class project Completed SynthPix Flow Gym
      Real-time PIV for fluid control
      Supervised by A. Terpin
  • Francesco Banelli
    • 2026 · Semester project Completed Publication in progress
      ART of PIV: Agentic real-time optical flow PIV
      Supervised by A. Terpin
    • 2025 · Class project Completed PIV-ADMM
      ADMM for PIV refinement
      Supervised by A. Terpin
    • 2025 · Class project Completed SynthPix Flow Gym
      Real-time PIV for fluid control
      Supervised by A. Terpin
  • Leander Hoffmann
    • 2026 · Semester project Ongoing
      Advanced diffuser design for a low-cost, tabletop water channel
      Supervised by A. Terpin, F. Weber
  • Alexander Przybysz
    • 2026 · Master thesis Ongoing
      Designing a morphing airfoil for fluid control in a tabletop water channel
      Supervised by A. Terpin, A. Czubarow
  • Federico De Giorgi
    • 2026 · Semester project Ongoing
      Designing a multi-element wing for fluid control in a tabletop water channel
      Supervised by A. Terpin
  • Mattia De Martino
    • 2026 · Semester project Ongoing
      Hard-constrained reinforcement learning with orthogonal projection layers for fluid control
      Supervised by A. Terpin, P. Grontas
  • Max Stoll
    • 2026 · Semester project Completed Publication in progress
      Prediction step in particle-tracking pipelines
      Supervised by A. Terpin
  • Alessandro Bretecher
    • 2025 · Semester project Completed
      CFD analysis of a tabletop water channel
      Supervised by A. Terpin
  • Youran Wu
    • 2025 · Semester project Completed
      Preliminary design of particle seeding for a low-cost, tabletop water channel
      Supervised by A. Terpin
  • Maximilian Stralz
    • 2025 · Semester project Completed
      Baselines for closed-loop fluid control
      Supervised by A. Terpin
  • Philip Pawlowsky
    • 2025 · Semester project Completed Publication in progress
      Volumetric fluid-flow estimation
      Supervised by A. Terpin

Acknowledgments.

We are grateful to all the colleagues who discussed this work with us and were intrigued by our setup and findings. In particular, we thank F. Noca and R. Bernhard for feedback on the fluid-dynamics hardware; A. K. Marcus for feedback on the mechanical design; Marc-André Corzillius for feedback on the LED illumination; T. Bi for the raw pictures of the setup; B. Lee and T. Anastasios for discussions on the limits of learning to control; C. Sferrazza, P. Abbeel, J. Lygeros, N. Lanzetti, S. Bolognani, P. Grontas, and F. Blanchini for their curiosity and insightful comments, and J. Lygeros and F. Banelli for title suggestions.