After two fully booked editions in July and September, Just us. is here to stay. Our new community event seems to strike a responsive chord. Casper van Eersel explains the enthusiasm for this low-key skills exchange at RoboHouse.

With robotics students ever more eager to engage in real-life workplace projects, September also marks the beginning of an era of even more space for talent in RoboHouse. The new EDUCATE wing just opened in our building. We spoke with the professor, community manager and TU Delft coordinator best placed to appreciate its value.

Student moonshot projects often punch far above their weight in terms of learning, productivity and motivation. What explains their unique educational impact? RoboCafé lines-up two heavyweights to bring you the inside story.

In February we asked ‘How can robotics help Rob, the gas leak detector?’, when announcing our collaboration with Alliander about cognitive robotics and worker wellbeing. Today, we are able to share some tentative insights.

Another RoboHouse community member strikes it big.

In traffic, in the supermarket or in the factory: in the near future, robots will no longer be standalone machines, but systems that operate and make decisions within the same environment as people. This is placing different demands on the design and development of such robots.

A smart greenhouse that calculates when vegetables need water and more heat. That’s what professor Tamás Keviczky from TU Delft’s 3mE faculty is working on. This approach cuts costs and is good for the environment.

The smarter robots become, the more we will encounter them – at home, in the streets, in shops and in the workplace – and the more they will interact directly with humans. So robots must get wise to human behaviour, says David Abbink.

Drive around a busy Dutch city centre one day and observe everything that happens around you. As a driver, you have to constantly make choices. Does the pedestrian, who is suddenly crossing the road, see you? Will that van give you right of way? What is the mother with a child on the back of her bike planning to do?

Biology is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for robotics. Whether it involves walking, grabbing, flying or swimming, robotics looks with amazement and interest at the rich variety of solutions that evolution has developed.

In March, asparagus maker Teboza took a bold step. It put the Sparter on its fields; an asparagus harvesting robot, developed with agritech scale-up Cerescon.

Robots can perform jobs underwater that are too complex or dangerous for humans. That is, if they can manage on their own. The REMARO project works with PhD students to make marine robotics more reliable.

Robots that safely navigate busy corridors to deliver medicines to nurses. And drones that manoeuvre around people, rubbish bins and poles without smashing things up. This is possible thanks to the models developed by researcher Javier Alonso-Mora from TU Delft.

Video credits: Studio Bravoure, Bas Lammers, Rick Wiegmans, Frits Jan Smit, Geraldo Solisa, Jaimy Siebel, Joost van de Loo, Michiel Bernabela, WEARETHEGOOD, Marieke Mulder and Casper van Eersel.

She is program manager at RoboHouse and one of the driving forces behind the Gazelle Accelerator success story in Europe.

On 19 April 2021 NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter photographed its own shadow, while hovering over the Martian surface. Ten days later two RoboHouse engineers received a badge: “Your code was used for the Mars helicopter!" How great things consist of small contributions in the field of robotics.

Lunar Zebro is an ambitious project to send cheap rovers to the moon. It could democratise space exploration. But suppose we sent these sturdy little robots into the world of interior decoration?

Remember flying a kite as a child? You had to muster all your strength to keep it from flying away. Professor Roland Schmehl and his team use this force and harvest electricity from it. But what would happen if we put this invention in the hands of a kindergarten teacher?

TU Delft researchers have designed a robotic ball that ball that rolls around by itself, inviting young children to explore and get active. Right now this autonomous ball is optimised for play, but we know that inventions are often used in unexpected ways. So we ask brasserie chef Lisan Peddemors the question: What if you would use this?

Always wanted to create a robot from scratch? That is exactly what TU Delft minor students did in recent months. On Thursday 28 January a thrilled audience witnessed their demonstrations, one of the most cherished occasions in RoboHouse.

Researchers at MAVLab are developing swarms of tiny drones for exploring and mapping dangerous places. But history shows that new technology is often used in unexpected ways. So in this series of articles, we take early-stage robotics from the research lab and bring it to a randomly selected workplace in the outside world.

Experience how it is to collaborate with a robot, via a new VR experience in RoboHouse. Commissioned by TU Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering and EIT Manufacturing.

How Heineken brings rapid robotics to its production lines, supported by future of work fieldlab RoboHouse, TNO and innovation programme SMITZH.