Welcome! Being a curious individual, I work as a scientific programmer and lab manager for the Computational Intelligence Group and Social AI Group at the VU Amsterdam. This gives me the opportunity to flex my problem solving muscles in a variety of robotics subdomains by supporting research, education and the general running of two labs.
As such and in my spare time, I have the privilege to conduct research in a variety of directions such as swarm robotics, robot learning, co-optimization of robot design and behaviour as well as evolutionary robotics. You show me the robot, I'll want to work with it.
In addition, I also conduct my own research in swarm robotics with a focus on collective navigation and response with the ultimate goal of deploying a robot swarm in a disaster situation. Swarm robotics and other multi-agent systems fascinate me because "the more, the merrier" also applies to robots and a swarm can solve problems individuals struggle with.
My team has placed 3rd in the Multi-Robot Inspection and Monitoring Real-World challenge at the IEEE RAS Summer School in Multi-Robot Systems solving a trajectory planning and execution task for point inspection using real drones.
My collaboration with NYU Abu Dhabi titled "Environmental Perception in a Swarm of Conversational Agents" has been accepted for a presentation and for publication in the proceedings of DARS 2026.
We have received a best video award and the runner-up best poster award at ANTS 2026 for our paper "Escaping the Trap: Benchmarking Swarm Gradient-following in Geometrically Constrained Environments".
My collaboration with the other ARIEL devs on presenting ARIEL and showcasing the blueprint around which it is built has been accepted to ALIFE 2026.
My collaboration with the other ARIEL devs on challenging the status quo of experiment control in evolutionary computation has been accepted to PPSN 2026.