Maria Lächele

Motion Perception and Simulation

I am Technical Manager for the motion simulator facilities and a member of the  research group Motion Perception and Simulation within the Human Perception, Cognition and Action Department of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

My research interests are the development of state-of-the-art control algorithms for our motion simulators and for self motion perception research.

My tasks are among other things the support service and further development of the CyberMotion Simulator (CMS) and the brand-new CableRobot Simulator (CRS) in terms of software, as well as supplying software tools to facilitate research on them. As a member of the Motion Perception and Simulation research group as well as the technical team around our simulation tools I am the link between the simulator facilities and the scientists.

WABS - Perception-based motion simulation

Within the WABS project („Wahrnehmungsbasierte Bewegungssimulation“) we developed a novel approach to motion cueing. This approach is based on the idea that motion cueing can be improved by including insights from human self-motion perception research in the motion cueing algorithms. This “perception-based motion cueing” (PBMC) approach increases the realism and quality of motion simulations by exploiting the limitations and ambiguities of the human perceptual system. 

Within the WABS project, I contributed mainly to the development of realtime H-I-L algorithms for our motion simulator (CMS) and the maintenance of our software and hardware components.

More about 

Diplomathesis "Development of a robot experimenter for haptic experiments"

In my diplomathesis I worked on the topic "Development of a robot experimenter for haptic experiments".

I programmed a little robot, a KUKA KR-3 antropomorphic arm, to pick haptic stimuli from a compartment and present them to participants.

Research Assistant

As a Research Assistant I worked on various tasks at the CyberMotion Simulator.