New year, new decade, new job, new city… and I get to play with robots!

It’s being a pretty hectic end/start of the year. As of last Monday (11th of January) I started working as Interaction Designer at VanBerlo Studios, the biggest design studio in the Netherlands and an important player in the European scene of product development.

As a consequence and after 9 years of my life spent in the little and picturesque town of Delft I had to move to Eindhoven, a bigger city down to the south of the Netherlands, very well known for being the headquarters of technology giants Philips and home of former European champions PSV Eindhoven (I guess I can never wear my Ajax jersey in public around this town).

The city is not as charming, but the work and the company is absolutely fantastic so far… and I get to play with robots! One of the first projects I’ll be working on deals with robotics and therefore today I paid a visit to the mechanical engineering department of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).

I can’t say much about the project yet, but I had a blast today when I got introduced to many of the semi-autonomous and fully-autonomous robots in which the TU/e are working on, such as the Tech United robo-football team (runners up at the last Robocup world championships) or the TUlip robot (developed together with the TU Delft and the University of Twente).

I also got to see life and up front a copy of the NAO Robot (awesome stuff!) performing a little tai-chi routine. These are commercial robots much like the Aibo, but at a price of around €10,000 only universities and research institutions dealing with robotics are likely to purchase one. But just in case you happen to have a few extra Euros lying around the house, here’s a video of what your newest gadget could look like. (I’ll post the video I made of the tai-chi routine later this week).

So yeah.. new year, new decade, new job, new colleagues, new city, new life… and I get to play with robots! how cool is that???