Associate Professor
Control Systems Technology Group · Department of Mechanical Engineering · Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)
My research addresses optimal and event-triggered control, approximate dynamic programming, and reinforcement learning under partial information, with applications ranging from networked and robotic systems to precision agriculture and electron microscopy.
Six current research lines
Legged (robot dog) and wheeled ground robots for weeding and seeding in arable and greenhouse settings, building on our group's work on world modelling, decision-making and control for precision farming.
Actor-critic methods for reinforcement learning with partial observability — including a “dramaturg”-style architecture that separates what an agent can act on from what it can only infer.
Autonomous drones carrying radiography payloads to inspect offshore wind turbine blades and high-voltage grid infrastructure without taking the asset offline.
Automating the tuning of transmission electron microscopes — learning aberration models from images, tracking drift as a dynamic process, and placing specimens precisely and repeatably.
Treating engine calibration as constrained Bayesian optimisation with an explicit risk budget, so an engine can keep recalibrating itself safely over its life.
Using AI to conduct automated oral exams that verify students genuinely did the project work themselves — combining large language models with control-style verification and assessment design.
Selected & recent output
Titles link through to the publisher or preprint. Full list of 45+ journal papers and 40+ conference papers available in the CV (PDF) or on Google Scholar.
Courses
Supervision
Plus 7 earlier completed PhD students as co-promoter, and supervision of 50+ MSc graduation projects and 50+ BSc/internship projects — see CV for the full list.
Demonstrations
Weeding with a Robot Dog
Robot Dog Seeding Demo
Drone and Ground Robot Interaction
Plant World-Model Construction
MPC with a Pitot Tube: Counteracting Disturbances
Iterative Learning Control
Press play on any clip to watch it here on the page.
Funding
Recognition
Contact
Control Systems Technology Group · Department of Mechanical Engineering · Eindhoven University of Technology · Eindhoven, The Netherlands