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Discover the stories of researchers at the
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering.

Contactless interaction between man and robot

In traffic, in the supermarket or in the factory: in the near future, robots will no longer be standalone machines, but systems that operate and make decisions within the same environment as people. This is placing different demands on the design and development of such robots.

New, biology-inspired robot brain

Biology is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for robotics. Whether it involves walking, grabbing, flying or swimming, robotics looks with amazement and interest at the rich variety of solutions that evolution has developed. Not that robotics blindly copies nature, but it does take what it can to use in its mechanical robots. An efficient way of letting a robot’s hand grab a delicate bell pepper, for example. Or an energy-efficient way of letting a robot walk on two legs.

Self-driving cars begin to understand road users’ behaviour

Drive around a busy Dutch city centre one day and observe everything that happens around you. As a driver, you have to constantly make choices. Does the pedestrian, who is suddenly crossing the road, see you? Will that van give you right of way? What is the mother with a child on the back of her bike planning to do? And then there’s the weather. You can be blinded by the sun. You see less in the shade and in the dark. The road could be slippery, or it could start to rain really hard. We’re usually unaware of how many intelligent decisions we make while driving, and the difficult conditions that we make them in.

Robot and humans have to understand each other

The smarter robots become, the more we will encounter them – at home, in the streets, in shops and in the workplace – and the more they will interact directly with humans. When that happens, robots will have to get wise to human behaviour, learn to work and communicate with people, and even learn from them. The opposite is true as well. Humans will need to have an idea of what robots are going to do, what they’re not going to do, what they can do and what they cannot do. Robots and humans are going to have to understand each other’s conduct.

Project Safeguard

TU Delft students of Industrial Design Engineering and Technical Medicine have joined forces to develop a smart protective wall that enables testing of possible COVID-19 patients without using scarce personal protective equipment and in any desired location.

Robots that learn like humans

In recent years, numerous reports have appeared in the media expressing concern and even fear about robots and artificial intelligence: fear that robots are going to steal our jobs (minister Asscher in 2014), and fear that artificial intelligence will eclipse and endanger human beings (physicist Stephen Hawking and entrepreneur Elon Musk). At the same time, we also witnessed impressive videos of robots, such as the one created by the American company Boston Dynamics: Big Dog robot walking up a slope in the snow, and the humanoid, two-legged robot Atlas that jumps over obstacles and does a back flip.

Purifying water with diamonds

Diamonds have always captured our imagination as a material for jewellery. Fewer of us are aware that engineers also consider diamonds to be an absolutely prime material with many, surprising applications. Researcher Ivan Buijnsters at TU Delft, for example, focuses on purifying water with diamonds.