Academic and Research Staff

The work in the Touch Lab (formal name: Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics) is guided by a broad vision of haptics which includes all aspects of information acquisition and object manipulation through touch by humans, machines, of a combination of the two; and the environments can be real or virtual. In order to make progress, we conduct research in multiple disciplines such as skin biomechanics, tactile neuroscience, human haptic perception, robot design and control, mathematical modeling and simulation, and software engineering for real-time human-computer interactions. These scientific and technological research areas converge in the context of specific application areas such as the development of virtual reality based simulators for training surgeons, real-time haptic interactions between people across the Internet, and direct control of machines from brain neural signals.