Experience

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  Disney Research

  • Canada
  • Research Services
  • 100 - 200 Employee

  • Associate Research Scientist

    • Sep 2023 - Present

  • Postdoctoral Researcher

    • Sep 2022 - Aug 2023

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  ETH Zürich

  • PhD Student

    • Sep 2017 - Aug 2022

    Supervisor: Prof. M. Hutter.Focus: Nonlinear Optimal Control, Legged Robots, Terrain Perception.My research interests center around nonlinear optimal control as a general tool to achieve autonomy in modern robotic systems, with a emphasis on quadrupedal walking robots. Throughout several publications, we explored how the key challenges in locomotion can be translated into dynamics, costs, and constraints, while keeping the optimization problem tractable. Ultimately, I developed a complete perception, planning, and control pipeline, that can optimize motions for all degrees of freedom of the robot in real-time. This research was part of the EU funded Horizon 2020 project THING with the goal to increase the autonomous locomotion capabilities of the robot in rough and challenging environments such as mines and sewers.

  • Teaching Assistant

    • Sep 2015 - Feb 2021

    In the fall semester 2015-2016 I was teaching assistant in the master level course "Linear Systems Theory". From 2017 till 2021, I was teaching assistant in the master course "Robot Dynamics"

  • Research Assistant

    • Apr 2017 - Sep 2017

    After recently finishing the master thesis at the Agile & Dexterous Robotics Lab, I continued to work on the HyQ quadruped robot. The main goals during my stay till September 2017 were to (1) publish the results of my thesis on model learning for robot locomotion, and (2) improve the current implementation of a direct collocation method for full body motions optimization.

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  Genscape, Inc.

  • Zürich en omgeving, Zwitserland

  • Data researcher

    • Aug 2015 - Mar 2017
    • Zürich en omgeving, Zwitserland

    Genscape offers, among other things, a simulation platform for the European energy market. For this purpose, accurate and up-to-date data of all possible players in the market is essential. My part-time job at the company involved updating the database with the latest power production information...

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  Siemens PLM Software

  • Leuven

  • Internship Student

    • Feb 2016 - Jul 2016
    • Leuven

    The goal of this internship was to extend an existing sampling based optimal control framework to higher dimensional problems. By introducing a tool for the embedding of engineering knowledge into the problem formulation, the sampling efficiency of the method was improved by several orders of mag...

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  Stichting Formula Zero Team Delft

  • Member of Forze Hydrogen Racing Team

    • Sep 2011 - Sep 2014

    2013-2014 Part-time electrical engineer2012-2013 Full-time board member; chief vehicle dynamics department2011-2012 Part-time suspension engineer

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  Stichting Studiebegeleiding Leiden

  • Teaching Assistant in Economics

    • Dec 2010 - May 2014
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  TU Delft

  • Teaching Assistant

    • Sep 2011 - Feb 2014

    During my studies in Delft, I was involved in various courses as a teaching assistant:2013-2014 Statics, Calculus2012-2013 Introduction to Aerospace engineering2011-2012 Programming in Matlab