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About

Thijs Van Hauwermeiren is a robotics researcher whose work bridges the frontiers of cooperative manipulation, tactile sensing, and dynamic control. His key research areas include multi-agent robotic systems, legged locomotion, and real-time trajectory adaptation. Van Hauwermeiren’s major contributions center on enabling robots to perform complex, underactuated tasks through hierarchical cooperation, as demonstrated in his most-cited work, “Learning to Cooperate” (13 citations), which extends the manipulative capabilities of dual-arm systems. He has also pioneered tactile exploration for legged robots, developing novel barometric pressure sensors that withstand repeated impacts, allowing quadruped robots like the Unitree Go1 to perceive edges and surfaces with unprecedented sensitivity. His work on real-time trajectory adaptation for tossing robots, using soft switching multiple model predictive control, addresses the challenge of dynamic target shifting during high-speed manipulation. Van Hauwermeiren’s research on tactile force sensing for admittance control further advances quadruped locomotion by improving ground reaction force estimation, reducing reliance on indirect joint torque models. His innovative sensor designs and control strategies are shaping the next generation of adaptive, perceptive robots capable of operating in unstructured environments.