#56 Soft Robotics Haptics with Femke Elise Van Beek

Femke van Beek works as a postdoc with Irene Kuling, in the Dynamics and Control Group of the Department of Mechnical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Her current project is part of the 4TU Soft Robots Program, in which soft robots are developed by taking inspiration from nature, like octopus arms and elephant trunks. She uses these soft robots for creating haptic feedback, i.e. touch feedback, in Virtual Reality and tele-operation applications. By using these novel soft haptic feedback displays, she investigates which haptic stimuli are vital to unlock more intuitive interactions with simulated systems.

Femke holds an MSc in sensory biology and biomechanics from Wageningen University, after which she changed her focus from animals to humans in her PhD. In her project, she worked on haptic perception for tele-operation applications, under the supervision of Astrid Kappers and Wouter Bergmann Tiest at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Next, she moved to Seattle for a postdoc at Oculus Research/Facebook Reality Labs, where she worked on using haptics together with visuals and sound to create tangible, interactable objects in Virtual and Augmented Reality. After 5 years of research in this industry setting, she returned to the Netherlands and to academia at the TU/e.

For more information about Femke, visit the TU/E official website.