Meet Sjoerd

Meet Sjoerd · Heemskerk Innovative Technology

Meet Sjoerd · Heemskerk Innovative Technology

After my bachelor Human Movement Science, I wanted to get more technical and I moved to Delft for my master Biomechanical Design. After finishing my courses I ended up as an intern at HIT, especially with an interest in robot ROSE. Something that triggered me was the purpose of the robot, which is more important to me than the technology I work on. Next to this what interested me was the interaction of the robot with humans. The robot is not only an interface that interacts with with human care receivers, but it will also interact with human operators that help the robot, when autonomy is insufficient. Next to having normal human limitations that have to be taken into account, limitations of each group will affect the design of the robot. This makes the robot to me much more interesting.

During my internship and graduation I implemented different modes of human robot interaction on robot ROSE and got familiar with the Interactive Task Simulator (ITS). I really liked my time as intern so much that I decided to stay after my graduation. The things I like the most about working at HIT is the working environment, where everybody is equal and motivated to develop, implement and test new technology.

This brings me to my role today, robotics engineer. Now I’m devoting most of my time to work on maintenance analysis on ITER. A totally different, but beautiful, purpose of technology and something that provides new challenges each day.

The open, development minded spirit, in combination with challenging problems, makes me go to work with a lot of pleasure each day.