[Integrated and lightweight photovoltaics]

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• Facing the challenges of our time
• Help create engineering tools that combine mechanics, computation and AI to make the design of complex optomechatronic systems faster, more rigorous and more reusable
• CSEM and the Engineering Design and Computing Laboratory of ETH Zurich are seeking a doctoral researcher to investigate how AI and advanced computational methods can support the design of high-performance optomechatronic systems. The research will be anchored in compliant mechanisms, where performance emerges from tightly coupled geometry, material behaviour, actuation, sensing, manufacturing and verification constraints
• The ambition is not to treat AI as a black box. You will develop scientifically grounded methods that combine physics-based models, simulation data and engineering knowledge, and make their predictions traceable, testable and useful to engineers

The project will build on the outcomes of Guilain Lang’s doctoral thesis, [], which established a systematic framework for translating requirements into compliant mechanism designs. The new research will critically assess and selectively reuse, adapt or extend the methods and tools developed in CAM2S2, without being constrained to retain the complete existing framework. From this foundation, it will develop and validate AI-assisted methods to derive engineering insight from requirements, explore broader solution spaces and generate reusable models for mechanism and optomechatronic system design. The exact thesis plan will be refined with the selected candidate and the supervisors. Expected research directions include:

link to the online thesis

• AI-assisted interpretation of requirements to identify critical design drivers, sensitive parameters, conflicts and uncertainty
• Traceable use of scientific literature and CSEM engineering knowledge, including models, test results and lessons learned
• Inverse and multi-objective design methods that connect required performance to geometry, material choices and manufacturing constraints
• Extension of mechanism synthesis beyond a limited set of topologies, including variable cross-sections and alternative manufacturing routes
• Physics-informed surrogate or reduced-order models for nonlinear stiffness, stress, buckling, parasitic motion and other key mechanism properties
• Automated generation of design-of-experiment campaigns using finite element models and computational methods
• Implementation and validation on representative compliant optomechatronic demonstrators