Research
“Engineering seamless interaction and collaboration between man and machine”
Near-future robot intelligence offers great potential for our society, provided we can co-operate with this technology. The Delft Haptics Lab is embedded in the Cognitive Robotics Department at TU Delft, where we aim to contribute to the responsible development of robotic technologies in human-inhabited environments. We do so by research organized in four groups: computer vision for intelligent vehicles, machine learning for learning and autonomous control, robot dynamics and human-robot interaction.
In the Human-Robot Interaction group we work on Cognitive Human-Robot Interaction (the team headed by Joost de Winter), and on Physical Human-Robot Interaction (the Delft Haptics Lab, a team headed by David Abbink). For an overview of David’s vision on research, please check this interview by Bennie Mols, or this article about his inaugural lecture in 2019.
The Delft Haptics Lab focuses on understanding how humans perform dynamic control tasks with robots (physical machines with a measure of autonomy), and to use this knowledge to design and evaluate interfaces that make robotic devices as easy to control as our own body or as easy to co-operate with as a well-trained horse. This requires in-depth knowledge of human sensorimotor control and perception. Applications we have investigated so far range from driving a car to flying a plane, and from interacting with tele-robotic devices to controlling exoskeletons. We focus on establishing and enriching physical interaction through forces, and on developing shared control to seamlessly combine human and machine capabilities, thereby creating human-robot symbiosis.
The research we perform is part of several research programmes. Our researchers each have their own research project, which can be associated to a research programme.
