Stijn Seuren joined the Haptics Lab as a Biomechanical Design student, in April 2017. After finishing his internship at NEC in Tokyo, he started working on his literature study on Teleoperation and Imitation Learning in the Haptics Lab. When he finished his literature study, he went to Italy to start his master thesis in collaboration with Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). He studied the research challenge of solving conflicts in reference between a human operator and a haptic shared controller. In simulation, he applied learning techniques (gaussian mixture models) developed at IIT to haptic shared control developed at the Haptics Lab, so that the controller could learn from an operator’s corrections, by measuring force conflicts in real-time and adapting the reference accordingly. Back in Delft, he applied these techniques on the Munin tele-operator, and performed an evaluation study to compare the real-time adaptive shared controller to non-adaptive shared control in case of conflicts, contrasting the performance to manual control and perfect haptic shared control.
Stijn was supervised by David Abbink (TU Deft) and Martijn Zeestraten (IIT), and successfully defended his thesis on the 14th of August 2018.