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About

Bart Jansen is a researcher whose work bridges the fields of human motor control, rehabilitation robotics, and artificial intelligence. His key research areas include the role of sensory feedback in locomotion, the development of shared action repertoires through imitation, and the self-organization of behavior in embodied agents. Jansen’s major contributions are twofold. First, in human-robot interaction, his study on optic flow speed during robot-assisted treadmill walking (2019, 18 citations) demonstrated how manipulating visual cues can actively engage healthy older adults, offering insights for designing more effective rehabilitation therapies. Second, in robotics and cognitive systems, his pioneering work on imitation (2003, 10 citations) introduced a framework where robotic agents invent and share action categories through imitative interactions, addressing the fundamental challenge of intention inference from demonstrations. This line of research, further developed in subsequent papers (2004, 2006, 2007), shows how imitation can lead to the self-organization of behavior in populations of agents, both in simulation and on real robots. Jansen’s work uniquely connects the dynamics of human movement with the emergent, social learning of artificial systems, making a notable impact on understanding how shared behaviors arise in both biological and robotic collectives.