Our Research Areas

Planning, learning and control for mobile robots, and swarms, that interact with other robots and humans

Autonomous Vehicles

We want self-driving cars and vessels that are capable of navigating in dense urban scenarios. We combine optimization and learning methods to model interaction and balance risk.

Flying Robots

We empower Micro Aerial Vehicles with autonomous capabilities to navigate in complex environments and seamlessly coordinate with other agents.

Mobile Manipulation

From healthcare to retail, mobile robots will move in and manipulate their environment. We develop novel algorithms for improved reliability in human-shared environments.




Social Robots

Ground robots operating seamlessly among humans requires novel approaches which enhance classic robot motion planning by accounting for interaction effects and social preferences.

On-demand Transportation

On-demand transportation will transform our cities and factories. We develop novel methods for on-demand ride-sharing, last-mile logistics and multi-robot transportation in human-centric environments.

Entertainment Robots

Robots can play an important role in entertainment, art and education. We support those efforts and have created a first-of-its-kind interactive display.

Our research is funded by the following grants

Current Projects

  • ERC Starting Grant, "INTERACT: Intuitive Interaction for Robots among Humans", 2022-2027.
  • NWO NWA NeurolabNL, "Perceptive acting under uncertainty: safety solutions for autonomous systems", 2021-2027.
  • EU H2020 ICT-46-2020 RIA, "HARMONY: Enhancing Healthcare with Assistive Robotic Mobile Manipulation", 2021-2024.
  • National Police AI Lab, "Smart mobile robots for intuitive, reliable and safe operation in hazardous environments", 2020-2024.
  • NWO Top Sector Water & Maritime: the Blue route, "Sustainable Transportation and Logistics over Water: Electrification, Automation and Optimization (TRiLOGy)", 2020-2024.
  • EU H2020 MG-2-7-2019 RIA, "SAFE-UP: proactive SAFEty systems and tools for a constantly UPgrading road environment", 2020-2023.
  • Ahold Delhaize "AI for Retail Lab Delft (AIRLab Delft)", 2019-2024
  • NICOP Office for Naval Research Global, "Distributed high-level scene reasoning with teams of heterogeneous robots", 2019-2022


Past Projects

At TU Delft
  • NWO Talent Scheme VENI grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), "Robots among humans: safe and socially intuitive navigation", 2017-2020.
  • Didi Udian Technologies, "Shared Mobility on Demand", 2019-2020.
  • Amazon Research Award, "Predictive Multi-objective Fleet Routing and Assignment", 2019
  • 3mE Cohesion funding, 2018-2019.
  • AMS strategic funding by the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS), 2017-2018.
  • NWO Take-Off Phase 1 grant in collaboration with Mainblades Inspection, 2018.
  • 3mE Cohesion funding, 2017-2018.

During my time at MIT (2014-2016) I was involved in the following projects:
  • Parallel autonomy and autonomous cars, CSAIL-Toyota joint research effort.
  • ONR SMart Adaptive Reliable Teams for Persistent Surveillance.
  • Mobile robots on the factory floor, funded by The Boeing Company.
  • Future Urban Mobility, Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART FM).