Prof. Dr. ir. Bram Vanderborght

Prof. Dr. ir. Bram Vanderborght attained a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2003, and subsequently earned his PhD in Applied Sciences, in 2007, from the same institution. The focus of his research was the use of adaptable compliance of pneumatic artificial muscles in the dynamically balanced biped Lucy. From May to June 2006, he conducted investigations into the humanoids robot HRP-2 at the Joint Japanese/French Robotics Laboratory (JRL) in AIST, Tsukuba (Japan). This research is described in the paper “Dynamically stepping over large obstacles by the humanoid robot HRP-2”. From October 2007 to April 2010, he worked as post-doctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genova (Italy) on the humanoid robot iCub and compliant actuation.

Since October 2009, Bram has been appointed as professor at the VUB where he teach mechatronics and assign robotics project. From October 2011 to September 2016, he was research director at the Universitatea Babes-Bolyai (Romania), at the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, with a project on robot assisted therapy with ASD children and VUB-PI of the DREAM project. Bram received an ERC Starting Grant on Series-Parallel Elastic Actuation for Robotics (SPEAR). 

Currently, Bram coordinates EU FET SHERO (Self-Healing Soft Robotics - project) and Marie Curie ITN SMART project, and is also VUB-PI of EU project SOPHIA. He was until 2020 the core lab manager of Flanders Make in Flexible Assembly. He is affiliated to the Interuniversity Microelectronics Institute (imec) (Belgium), as scientific collaborator. Bram is also member of Brubotics , the multidisciplinary research center on Human robot interaction. He also co-lead the Homo Roboticus project, on how to keep the human values central in a robotized world. Until 2020, he was the Editor In Chief of IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. Since 2022, Bram is  Vice President of Media Services at the IEEE-RAS.

His research interests include the use of soft and self-healing actuators for cognitive and physical human robot interaction in applications in health and manufacturing. His works are on display in the AI Experience Center .