TUD - Evryon Project

Description of partecipating institution
TU Delft is the largest technical university in The Netherlands, with approximately 4,500 employees and 13,000 students. The EVRYON project will be executed at the Delft Biorobotics Laboratory (www.dbl.tudelft.nl), which is part of the BioMechanical Engineering group (BMechE) and of the Delft Center for Mechatronics and Microsystems, all situated in the department of Mechanical Engineering.

Main tasks
The TUD will be work package leader of the Simulation Environment and Preliminary Tests (WP 2) and will contribute to the other work packages.

Expertise
The TUD has extensive knowledge of biomechanics and human motion control, as well as design abilities to transform this knowledge into lightweight, energy efficient and easily controllable technical systems. Understanding of complex multibody dynamics is present in BMechE and in the closely related Engineering Mechanics group. The research topics in this group that are in close relation to the proposed project are prosthetics, bio-robotics, haptics, bipedal walkers and mobile pneumatics. On the field of bipedal walking robots, this group occupies a prominent position in the world. Prof. van der Helm and Dr. ir. Wisse head the biorobotics activities, specifically aiming at simple, bio-inspired designs for efficient walking machines and for safe interactive robots. With the research on efficient two-legged walking robots, the group has received international recognition as evidenced by a recent publication in Science.

Key personnel

Prof. VAN DER HELM is professor in Biomechatronics and Bio-robotics and head of the Department of Biomechanical Engineering. He is a member of the board of the International Society of Biomechanics (ISB), and participates in the board of the Technical Group of Computer Simulation (TGCS) and the International Shoulder Group (ISG). He is one of the program leaders in the Delft Centre on Biomedical Engineering. He is chairman of TREND, a Dutch research consortium of academic medical centres, technical universities and companies, investigating Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) as a neurological disorder.

Dr. VAN DER KOOIJ is associate professor at the Department of Biomechanical Engineering at the University of Twente (0.8 fte), Delft University of Technology (0.2 fte), the Netherlands. His expertise and interests are in the field of human motor control, adaptation, and learning, rehabilitation robots, diagnostic robotics, virtual reality, rehabilitation medicine, and neuro computational modelling. He is member of member of IEEE EMBS technical committee of Biorobots and was member of several scientific program committees in the field of rehabilitation robotics, bio robotics, and assistive devices. At the UT he is founder and head of Rehabiliation robotics laboratory that developed powered exoskeletons for the rehabilitation of upper and lower extremities. He is also founder and head of the Virutal Reality Human performance lab.

Dr. WISSE received the M.Sc. in 2000 and the Ph.D. with honours (cum laude) in 2004, both from Delft University of Technology. In 2004-2005 he held a Postdoc position at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. In 2005 he started as an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology. He is a member of IEEE. He authored 20 peer reviewed publications (journals plus conferences) amongst which a recent article in Science. He organized workshops on Passive Dynamic Walking at the 2004 CLAWAR conference and at Carnegie Mellon University. He has been a member of the program committee of the IEEE International conference on Humanoid robots (Humanoids) since 2004. He received the “EURON PhD-award” from EURON in recognition for the scientific and media impact of his PhD Thesis.

Wietse VAN DIJK received his M.Sc. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design Engineeering in 2010 from the University of Twente. His thesis focused on the design of an passive exoskeleton using elastic elements to improve human performance. He is currently a PhD student in the Biorobotics Laboratory in the Biomechnical Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. His is supervised by Herman van der Kooij and Frans van der Helm. His research program concerns the simulation and design of exoskeletons and their interaction with the human body.