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On Friday March 22nd 2019, David Abbink gave his inaugural address as professor of Haptic Human-Robot Interaction at Delft University of Technology. In his talk David gave an overview of his work, argued why we need to focus more on robot symbiosis than robot autonomy, let the whole audience hop on one leg, and stated he would strive to revitalize the truly multi-disciplinary spirit of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. Afterwards, the audience could experience five haptic demo’s.

Semi-automated vehicles on our motorways, a mobile robot arm that can effectively intervene in a disaster area, drones: these are all examples of robots that exist our unpredictable environment. These robots cannot manage without human intervention, however: behind every successful robot there’s a human being. A strong foundation for operating robot arms and robot vehicles is haptics: our innate ability to feel our body.

Dr. J. Alonso-Mora appointed Principal Investigator at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS).

One successful study after another appears to have a different outcome if the experiment is repeated. To learn what such a repeat study says, Delft researchers also made one: do pupils betray someones emotions?

Dr. J. Alonso-Mora is the recipient of an Amazon Research Award to perform research on multi-robot motion planning and a research collaboration with Didi Udian Technologies has been stablished for joint work on shared MaaS (ride-sharing). More information: http://www.alonsomora.com/

An international team from TU Delft and the Czech Technical University (CTU) based in Prague have won the Taxify Self-driving Fleet Optimisation Challenge. Representatives from TU Delft included researchers Javier Alonso Mora and Michal Cap, who work at the Department of Cognitive Robotics (CoR) at the Automated Mobility-on-Demand with Ride-sharing (AMR) research group. The aim of the challenge was to optimise the operation of a fleet of self-driving passenger service vehicles, for example taxis in an urban environment.

Dean Theun Baller and Hans Hellendoorn, head of the Department of Cognitive Robotics, oversaw the festive opening of the new CoR lab this month.

The European Research Council has awarded ERC Starting Grants to seven TU Delft researchers. The grants (1,5 million euros for a five-year programme) are intended to support scientists who are in the early stages of their career and have already produced excellent supervised work.