Julian Nubert

Co-founder · Perception Lead at Flexion Robotics

Robotics researcher and co-founder, building perception for humanoid robots.

I'm a co-founder of Flexion Robotics, where I lead the perception team. At Flexion we are building the autonomy stack for humanoid robots. It covers perception, locomotion, manipulation and task-level reasoning, uses simulation and reinforcement learning, and is designed to transfer to real-world hardware.

Before Flexion, I did my PhD at ETH Zurich in the Robotic Systems Lab with Marco Hutter, as part of the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems with Katherine J. Kuchenbecker (Haptic Intelligence, MPI for Intelligent Systems). During my PhD I also worked with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. My thesis focused on robust and flexible robot state and motion estimation through optimization and learning: LiDAR odometry, localizability-aware registration, and multi-sensor factor-graph fusion for robots operating in extreme environments.

Robot perception
State estimation
Sensor fusion & SLAM
Learning for robotics
Humanoids

Now

Flexion

Flexion builds the robots' brain: a hardware-agnostic autonomy stack that takes humanoids from simulation to real-world tasks.

Co-founder, leading the perception team
Offices in Zurich and San Francisco
Named Best Ranked Robotics Startup at the Top 100 Swiss Startup Award

Visit flexion.ai

News

2026-07Flexion announced a Sim2Real research collaboration with Niantic Spatial and NVIDIA.Announcement
2026-07Holistic Fusion was published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.Paper
2026-06Flexion released Reflect v1.0, our work on generalizable, long-horizon humanoid autonomy.Announcement
2025-11Flexion raised a USD 50M Series A, led by DST Global Partners with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA), Prosus Ventures, redalpine and Moonfire.Announcement
2025-11Flexion released Reflect v0, our first step towards generalizable robot autonomy.Announcement
2025-06I defended my PhD at ETH Zurich: Towards Robust and Flexible Robot State and Motion Estimation through Optimization and Learning.Thesis
2025-01Started our journey at Flexion Robotics together with Nikita Rudin, David Hoeller and Fabian Tischhauser.
2024-12Raised our seed round of USD 7.35M.

Selected publications

Holistic Fusion: Task- and Setup-Agnostic Robot Localization and State Estimation With Factor Graphs
Julian Nubert, Turcan Tuna, Jonas Frey, César Cadena, Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, Shehryar Khattak, Marco Hutter
IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2026
DOI arXiv Code
Continuous-Time State Estimation Methods in Robotics: A Survey
William Talbot, Julian Nubert, Turcan Tuna, César Cadena, Frederike Dümbgen, Jesus Tordesillas, Timothy D. Barfoot, Marco Hutter
IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2025
DOI arXiv
X-ICP: Localizability-Aware LiDAR Registration for Robust Localization in Extreme Environments
Turcan Tuna, Julian Nubert, Yoshua Nava, Shehryar Khattak, Marco Hutter
IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2024
DOI arXiv
Graph-based Multi-sensor Fusion for Consistent Localization of Autonomous Construction Robots
Julian Nubert, Shehryar Khattak, Marco Hutter
IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022
DOI arXiv Code
Learning-based Localizability Estimation for Robust LiDAR Localization
Julian Nubert, Etienne Walther, Shehryar Khattak, Marco Hutter
IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022Best Student Paper Award Finalist
DOI arXiv
Self-supervised Learning of LiDAR Odometry for Robotic Applications
Julian Nubert, Shehryar Khattak, Marco Hutter
IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021
DOI arXiv Code
Safe and Fast Tracking on a Robot Manipulator: Robust MPC and Neural Network Control
Julian Nubert, Johannes Köhler, Vincent Berenz, Frank Allgöwer, Sebastian Trimpe
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2020
DOI arXiv

All publications →

Education

PhD, Robotics & Machine Learning · 2020–2025
ETH Zurich · Robotic Systems Lab & Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems
MSc, Robotics, Systems & Control · 2017–2020
ETH Zurich · thesis at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
BSc, Electrical Engineering & Information Technology · 2014–2017
ETH Zurich

Honors

IROS 2022 Best Student Paper Award Finalist
ETH Medal for outstanding Master's thesis (2020)
Willi Studer Prize, ETH Zurich: best Master's graduate in Robotics, Systems & Control (2020)