Prof. dr. ir. David A. Abbink (1977) is a full Professor in Human-Robot Interaction, two days in the department of Cognitive Robotics of the Mechanical Engineering Faculty, and two days in the department of Sustainable Design Engineering of the Industrial Design Faculty, both at Delft University of Technology. He leads the transdisciplinary research and innovation center FRAIM, that aims to shape the future of physical work, with and for workers.
David was voted best teacher of his department for seven consecutive years, best teacher of his faculty twice, and received an international open courseware award for his course "The Human Controller".
His PhD thesis on haptic assistance for car-following was awarded the best Dutch Ph.D. dissertation in movement sciences (2006), and contributed to the market release of Nissan’s Distance Control Assist system. David received two prestigious personal grants - VENI (2010) and VIDI (2015) and was co-PI on the H-Haptics programme, where 16 PhD students and 3 postdocs collaborated on designing human-centered haptic shared control for tele-robotics, across various application domain.
His research on human-automation interaction has won several awards and received funding from major industry partners such as Nissan, Renault, Boeing, Schiphol, KLM, Erasmus Medical Centre.