Femke van Beek is an Assistant Professor within the Robotics section of Mechanical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. She combines soft robotics with haptic perception to provide autonomous robots with a (soft) sense of touch. Her work is part of the 4TU Green Sensors project, in which she aims to explore active perception strategies for bio-inspired soft robots for agricultural applications. She uses her multidisciplinary background and her knowledge on human haptic perception to design soft haptic sensors that are useful in practice. Moreover, she is interested in exploiting robotic movement to acquire more useful sensory data. Finally, she uses dedicated VR and AR experiments to learn the basic principles of haptic perception from humans, in order to build human-inspired robots with a sense of touch.

Femke holds an MSc in sensory biology and biomechanics from Wageningen University, after which she changed her focus from animals to humans in her PhD. In her project, she worked on haptic perception for tele-operation applications, under the supervision of Astrid Kappers and Wouter Bergmann Tiest at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Next, she moved to Seattle to work as a researcher at Oculus Research/Facebook Reality Labs, where she used soft robotic techniques to combine haptics with visuals and sound to create tangible, interactable objects in Virtual and Augmented Reality. After 5 years of research in this industry setting, she returned to the Netherlands and to academia at the TU/e.