Bergeijk, North Brabant, Netherlands
After almost 20 years research on autonomous driving (both as researcher, senior project lead and technology domain lead), I currently enjoy my job as CTO at Nipper.
I lead a team of 20+ professionals on Autonomous Mobile Working. We deliver research as well as B2B projects on autonomous work-drive vehicles in manufacturing, logistics and agricultural environments. Our main expertise is on robust perception and localization (semantic SLAM), path planning, fault-tolerant control and validation.
As a project leader I'm involved in multiple projects in which we design, implement and validate autonomous work-drive functions in several application domains, such as the logistics, manufacturing and argricultural sector: - the European autodrive project with a focus on fault-tolerant lateral control, implemented at our demonstrator vehicle (see movie) - internal projects on the development of a platform for autonomous driving, applied to a bus, passenger vehicle and tractor (see movie) - an ICON project on obstacle avoidance applied to an autonomous forklift, including dynamic velocity constraints and reverse driving.
As a research engineer at Flanders Make, I worked on projects related to autonomous vehicles in public transport, manufacturing and logistics.
Next to my job at TNO, I worked part-time as a PhD candidate on the topic of 'Safe Truck Platooning' at the Eindhoven University of Technology, Mechanical Engineering dept., Dynamcs & Control group. See the journal publication on "String Stable Model Predictive Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control for Heterogeneous Platoons", Jun 2019, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT VEHICLES for more details.
Together with my colleagues, I was the first in the Netherlands to drive cooperative and fully autonomoulsy (at 0.3s time gap) on the public road. I've implemented several fault-tolerant algorithms (to recover from packet loss and / or a sensor failure) and I've gained many hours of experience in both testing as well as demonstrations of cooperative automated driving (for a few examples see the movies below). As researcher in the department of Integrated Vehicle Safety, I’ve mainly worked on topics related to cooperative automated driving: - risk estimation; with a focus on Vulnerable Road User (VRU) Safety in urban environments - collision avoidance; the main challenge is to enable short inter-vehicle distances, while guaranteeing safety - gracefull degradation; short inter-vehicle distances in platooning are enabled by using V2V communication. In case of a V2V failure, it's desired to maintain the following functionality. - environmental perception; target tracking and fusion provide the most important inputs to the platooning functionality. For all these topics, I've implemented and tested my developed algorithms in experimental vehicles. Further, I've gained quite some on-road experience with cooperative automated diving, also in mixed traffic conditions. A few of my latest research questions were: - How to guarantee safety of truck platooning at short inter-vehicle distances for hazardous traffic and/or hardware failures of sensors or communication by developing smart collision avoidance control strategies? - How can stochastic models of traffic uncertainties be integrated in a collision avoidance controller for truck platooning?
After a general learning period (basic knowledge in electronic IC design and manufacturing of ICs) I’ve done several projects: - Development of structures and criteria to validate parasitic extraction tools for the modelling of unwanted capacitors and resistors, - Validation of parasitic extraction tools for the Aligned Releases of Philips. - Interconnect variability; I’ve analysed measurements to determine the capacitance variation.