About Delft Haptics Lab
"The future of control is partnership, co-control; the creator must share control with his creations."
Who are we?
The Delft Haptics Lab is a team of several researchers that are part of the Human-Robot Interaction group in the Department of Cognitive Robotics, at the Faculty of 3mE, of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Our lab is also affiliated with the Delft Robotics Institute and AiTech.
Our vision, mission and goals
We envision a future where robots (machines with some intelligence and autonomy) will not replace or threaten us, but where we will cooperate with them, and where human experience and our quality of life will be enhanced. This requires alignment of robot behavior with human behavior, and bi-directional communication and mutual learning between humans and robots. The very human ability to physically interact with (and quickly adapt to) complex environments has been neglected in many human-robot interfaces, and may serve as a useful way to promote alignment and bi-directional communication. We therefore aim to engineer novel haptic interaction as a basis for bi-directional communication, adaptation and learning. Sharing control through haptics is our core approach to engineer such interfaces.
Our mission is to understand how humans use forces when performing dynamic control tasks, and use that knowledge to help improve physical interaction with machines. Our goal toward this mission, is to conduct research and provide education in the area of haptic and human-robot interaction, on fundamental topics as well as over a wide range of practical applications (driving, flying, remote nuclear maintenance, sub-sea mining, robotic surgery, lifting aids). Through close collaboration with companies we strive to accelerate the development of our fundamental research to market applications. Additionally, with our many media and outreach activities we aim to stimulate societal discussion about human-robot interaction – and show the importance of research and education in these topics.
To enable its activities, the Delft Haptics Lab has generated its own funding through collaborations with (inter)national companies such as Nissan, Boeing and Renault, as well as through highly competitive research grants from the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO-TTW). The lab is headed by professor David A. Abbink, and its members have received multiple awards for education and research.