Award for best IEEE SMC paper on cybernetics

AiTech core team member David Abbink, together with Max Mulder (Aerospace Engineering), received an important award at the at the 2019 IEEE Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, the flagship conference of the IEEE SMC society. The Andrew P. Sage Best Transaction Paper is selected from all 2018 publications of the SMC Transaction journals: e.g., Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, Transactions on Cybernetics. Criteria include: originality, technical merit, potential impact, and presentation quality.

This year the Andrew P. Sage Best Transaction Paper was awarded to "Manual Control Cybernetics: State-of-the-art and Current Trends", published in the Golden Jubilee Edition of IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems (vol. 48, no. 5, pp. 468-485, 2018). The paper provides an overview of manual control cybernetics, as advanced in the last two decades by Max Mulder (first author) in collaboration with many colleagues in his lab (Daan Pool, Rene van Paassen, Peter Zaal, Frank Drop and Kasper van der El) and the Delft Haptics Lab (David Abbink and Erwin Boer). The paper presents the state-of-the-art and future trends for models and identification techniques to disentangle the multiple nested loops of neuromuscular, vestibular and visual control in human manual control behavior.

The work exemplifies David Abbink's vision on how humans could stay in meaningful control over artificial systems: by understanding how a single user stays in control of a single robot, we can engineer symbiotic cooperation between humans and robots from the ground up.