Human-Centered Neuroengineering

The Focus Group “Human-Centered Neuroengineering” involves Hans Fischer Senior Fellow Prof. Nitish V. Thakor (Johns Hopkins University) and his host Prof. Gordon Cheng (Institute for Cognitive Systems, TUM Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering).

Our vision is to take inspiration from the most complex and complete ‘robot’, the human. More specifically, we want to take inspiration from the human brain to provide robots (and prosthesis) the intelligence. While this is our ambitious vision, our more specific goals pertain to using the bio/neuro inspired approach, we call Neuroengineering to implement and transfer some key principles of human sensation, perception, and cognition to robotic mechanism. Our model robot is the dexterous upper limb prosthetic hand, a marvel of mechatronic that currently we have implemented a dexterous multi-fingered prosthetic hand.

Prof. Cheng (TUM) and Prof. Thakor (JHU) share the interest and expertise in the field of Neuroengineering, setting their goal as learning from the human sensory and motor system, brain and its cognitive network (expertise of Prof. Thakor), to create next generation humanoid robots (expertise of Prof. Cheng). This Focus Group pursues to create an experimental platform for the examination of sensorimotor embodiment, whereby for example an amputee can learn to restore his or her sense of touch and act in the world.

Prof. Thakor holds a TUM-IAS Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship funded by Siemens AG.

TUM-IAS funded doctoral candidate:

Yuly Paredes Acuna, Chair of Cognitive Systems

Publications by the Focus Group