Jonas Frey

I am a PostDoc at Stanford (Autonomous System Lab) with Prof. Marco Pavone and UC Berkeley (BAIR) with Prof. Jitendra Malik. My research focuses on Learning Perception and Navigation for Legged Robots with a focus on training RL policies and Large Behaviour Models.

I obtained my Ph.D. in robotics at the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, co-advised by Prof. Marco Hutter and Prof. Georg Martius. During my Ph.D. I joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a visiting researcher and continuously collaborate with the Dynamic Robotic Systems Group by Prof. Maurice Fallon at University of Oxford. I worked as a Collaborative Robotics Engineer at SEW-Eurodrive before starting my Master’s in Robotics Systems and Control at ETH Zurich. Throughout my Master’s I was supervised by Prof. Roland Siegwart and spent most of my time at the Autonomous Systems Lab. During my Bachelor’s, I worked at the chair for High Performance Humanoid Technologies with Prof. Tamim Asfour (KIT, Germany) and conducted my Bachelor’s Thesis with Prof. Takamitsu Matsubara in Japan (NAIST, Japan).

selected publications

Locomotion policy guided traversability learning using volumetric representations of complex environments

Jonas Frey, David Hoeller, Shehryar Khattak, and 1 more author

In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2022

Bib Paper Video

@inproceedings{frey2022locomotion,
  author = {Frey, Jonas and Hoeller, David and Khattak, Shehryar and Hutter, Marco},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
  iros = {true},
  organization = {IEEE},
  pages = {5722--5729},
  title = {Locomotion policy guided traversability learning using volumetric representations of complex environments},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15854},
  year = {2022}
}

Fast Traversability Estimation for Wild Visual Navigation

Jonas Frey, Matias Mattamala, Nived Chebrolu, and 3 more authors

In Robotics: Science and Systems 2023, 2023

Bib Paper Video Code Poster Website

@inproceedings{frey2023fast,
  author = {Frey, Jonas and Mattamala, Matias and Chebrolu, Nived and Cadena, Cesar and Fallon, Maurice and Hutter, Marco},
  booktitle = {Robotics: Science and Systems 2023},
  rss = {true},
  title = {Fast Traversability Estimation for Wild Visual Navigation},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08510},
  year = {2023}
}

RoadRunner - Learning Traversability Estimation for Autonomous Off-road Driving

Jonas Frey, Shehryar Khattak, Manthan Patel, and 5 more authors

IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics 2024, 2024

Bib Paper

@article{frey2024roadrunner,
  author = {Frey, Jonas and Khattak, Shehryar and Patel, Manthan and Atha, Deegan and Nubert, Julian and Padgett, Curtis and Hutter, Marco and Spieler, Patrick},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics 2024},
  tfr = {true},
  title = {RoadRunner - Learning Traversability Estimation for Autonomous Off-road Driving},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19341},
  year = {2024}
}

Boxi: Design Decisions in the Context of Algorithmic Performance for Robotics

Jonas Frey, Turcan Tuna, Lanke Frank Tarimo Fu, and 8 more authors

Robotics: Science and Systems 2025, 2025

Bib Paper Code

@article{frey2025boxi,
  author = {Frey, Jonas and Tuna, Turcan and Fu, Lanke Frank Tarimo and Weibel, Cedric and Patterson, Katharine and Krummenacher, Benjamin and M{\"u}ller, Matthias and Nubert, Julian and Fallon, Maurice and Cadena, Cesar and others},
  journal = {Robotics: Science and Systems 2025},
  rss = {true},
  title = {Boxi: Design Decisions in the Context of Algorithmic Performance for Robotics},
  year = {2025}
}