Olger Siebinga joined the department as a PhD student under supervision of David Abbink, on the 1st of March 2020. On May 17th 2024 he obtained his PhD thesis with honors (cum laude). See also his personal website here.
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He worked on the Nissan project on Driver Knowledge which aims to quantify and model interactive driver behavior. The overal goal was to apply these models to autonomous vehicle controllers, in order to increase the capability of autonomous driving technology to handle mixed traffic situations.
To enhance AV-human interactions, the thesis proposes a joint driver model that considers multi-level contributions of drivers. It critiques existing models, highlighting their limitations in capturing dynamic interactions. For instance, many models only consider single drivers and fail to address communication and continuous behavioral adaptation.
The CEI model framework explicitly accounts for driver communication and integrates deterministic future plans with probabilistic beliefs. This framework acknowledges that humans do not continuously optimize behavior but seek satisfactory solutions. The thesis presents a case study where the CEI model accurately describes merging scenarios, generating human-like gap-keeping behavior.
Two year before starting my PhD, I graduated at biomechanical design/bio-robotics with a master thesis on shared control in exoskeletons. After my graduation I worked for two years as a Python developer at Fleet Cleaner, a robotics start-up in Delft. My hobbies include brewing beer, skiing and sailing.