My name is Tassos Natsakis and I am an associate professor at the ROCON lab of Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. My background is in Mechanical engineering and I have done extensive research on the biomechanics of human locomotion. More specifically I studied the behaviour of the human foot in-vitro, with the goal to understand and improve surgical procedures and medical implants. My current research area is in the intersection of the rehabilitation and robotic fields, having lead various research projects for the development of a robotic rehabilitator.
I am also actively collaborating with .lumen, a romanian start-up that builds glasses that help the blind live a better life. My work there deals with feedback mechanisms and with bridging the gap between the engineering and clinical investigation teams.
Besides research, I am very interested in teaching methods, knowledge management, and productivity, in an attempt to make my research more efficient, pleasant, and easier for others to understand.
PhD in Biomedical Engineering, 2015
KU Leuven, Belgium
MEng in Mechanical Engineering, 2010
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Update: added some nice pictures from the lab and the robots
There is a small paradox at our department: we are teaching robotics to students, but we used to not have any robots around for them to play with. We actually did have one, that is very very dangerous to use close to people, so I slowly slowly phased it out of use.
But I had to find an alternative: a small, versatile, cheap, robot arm, that we could buy multiples of it and have one for each table of the laboratory. That was how the dream started, and finally, today, this dream came true! Today I finished assemblying and installing the 10th AL5D robot arm in our laboratory!
For quite some time now, I wanted to create a robot model to use it in the classroom. I started imagining it as a 3D printed model, then thought of making it out of styrofoam, converted the idea to carton, but was always stopped by the lack of materials around. Also, the fact that we’ve been teaching online for the past year and a half was not helping.
Last week, I thought of wood. And the moment I thought about it I was wondering how come I didn’t think about this all this time! It is the obvious solution, as there is always wood scraps readily available that I am saving from other projects, plus I have the tools to work with it. So, I spent ~2 years thinking about this, and eventually it took me around 20’ to make it! Here is the result.
I don’t remember when did it exactly happen, but at some point I landed on a elegant looking community blog that is called Less Wrong. They advertise themselves as “[…] a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making” and the name is derived by the realisation that in order to learn, we must constantly err, but each time less and less.
It is basically a blog where anyone can post essays or ideas on the topic of rationality and real-world applications of it. Applications such as AI, decision making, or community structuring. The site offers a very nice way of commenting and ‘rating’ these essays, and in general it seems like a nice place to be, so I kept visiting it every now and then.
An international space & robotics event of martian rovers.
A two year long research project funded by UEFISCDI exploring ideas on robotic rehabilitation
A series of two Horizon projects on collecting litter from the seafloor
A two year long research project funded by UEFISCDI.
A meetup group for researchers from any field that are active in Cluj-Napoca.
The gait simulator was the main experimental equipment that I developed during my PhD.
Alumni Business Camp is a yearly event that gathers Alumni of BEST to talk about… Business!
I was a volunteer at BEST (Board of European Students of Technology), for 5 years, being active in all levels of involvement
Involved in the publishers team of an award winning high school newspaper
I am responsible for the following courses at Technical University of Cluj-Napoca:
Starting from the second semester of 2020-2021, I am also teaching at the Babeș-Bolyai University, as the department of Physics as an external collaborator
If you are interested in a project, please read the thesis manifesto and check the list of student project ideas