Soft Haptic Human-Robot Interaction (TUD)
- Lead Researchers: Michaël Wiertlewski and David Abbink
This project focuses on enabling human-in-the-loop control over soft tele-robotic manipulators. Such soft robotic manipulators require many more degrees of freedom than can be intuitively controlled by humans with traditional interfaces (like joysticks, or even 6DOF haptic manipulators or exoskeletons).
Inspiration for novel control and interaction will be sought in nature (e.g., the way animals like cuttlefish control their soft limbs), in close collaboration with the BioMechE at TU Delft and Wageningen University. The strong haptic expertise in mechatronics and control engineering of at TU/e will be necessary to accelerate development of high-quality prototypes, and much synergy is expected.
Haptic Interaction for Multi-segment control (TUD)
- Lead Researchers: Michaël Wiertlewski and David Abbink
This postdoc will contribute to developing multi-modal workstations based on novel haptic manipulators and augmented reality, needed to allow effective human-in-the-loop control over soft robotic limbs. She/he will support the TUD tenure tracker working on Soft Haptic Human-Robot Interaction, and work closely with the tenure tracker and postdoc at Eindhoven, as well as the UT postdoc on transducers.
Human Soft-Robot Interaction and Design (TU/e)
- Lead Researchers: TBD
This tenure track position will focus on exploiting the flexible characteristics of soft robots to safely and effectively (co)-operate in close proximity with humans. Co-operation with soft robots will be achieved via rigorous design and control of soft robots on the one hand and by understanding how humans (have to) interact with the soft robots on the other hand. Strong synergy is expected with the group of prof. Abbink, and his proposed tenure track position and postdoc on haptic human-robot interaction.