Caspar Hanselaar

About me

So far, I’ve had a meandering path in my life and education. After finishing my high school, I attended medicine studies at Utrecht University, only to realize that it wasn’t offering me the challenge I was looking for. So I restarted my education at the Technical University of Delft, where I completed both the Bachelor and Master of Mechanical Engineering with Cum Laude. Fascinated by the automotive sector (and a bit of a car-nut), I’ve since worked at McLaren Racing in the UK, at Bosch and TNO Integrated Vehicle Safety in the Netherlands. After completing a project at TNO, the call of research was too hard to ignore, so I stepped away from focused on industry, to pursue research at the Technical University of Eindhoven. I like to consider myself a well-rounded car-nut, enjoying both 4-wheeled forms of transport, as well as the 2-wheeled kind. Regardless, as a society we have a long way to go to ensure we can keep enjoying all these and other beautiful things, and I hope to contribute to this through my studies.

Personal Motivation

Readily available personal mobility, using bicycles, motorcycles, cars, public transport and any other form imaginable, is essential to allow people to attain their potential. This is at odds with the stark reality that we need to reduce our emissions drastically to attain a sustainable way of living together on this little spaceship called Earth. Moving to an electric car will not be enough: more and more people will be looking to buy vehicles for personal and professional use around the globe, thereby incurring significant emissions in production of these vehicles. However, some will stay behind and lack the funds to purchase these vehicles, removing some of their opportunities to attain their potential in life. To me, creating a fully autonomous and self-driving Mobility-As-A-Service (MAAS) solution solves this conundrum: by being both convenient and affordable, such a service removes a barrier to entry for personal transportation, as initial purchase costs are removed. Next self-driving MAAS will reduce the need for car (or second car) ownership for a large number of people, greatly reducing the emissions connected to vehicle production. I believe this development will prove very fruitful for our society as a whole, allowing people and companies to explore new possibilities as they are revealed.

Smart & safe mobility - the safety envelope

We feel that the Safety Envelope is an essential step to attaining self-driving vehicles, and thereby an enabler of an affordable and accessible MAAS solution for all. The Safety Envelope attempts to determine the safety of a vehicle, in its uncertain environment, using the fruits of labor of many a brilliant research team working on self-driving vehicle capabilities. We seek to combine different efforts, in a way that does not hinder any team’s development speed, but rather augments their efforts by detecting and mitigating unknown limitations of their systems.

This approach is not exclusive to self-driving vehicles, and can be considered applicable to mixed control situations as well, helping to reduce road fatalities around the globe.

Link to other neon research

We’re proud to be in the same WP with Gijs Dubbelman, from TU/e Electrical Eng., to discuss reaching a holistic scene understanding, able to detect and interpret (inter-) object behavioral, model the scene and the context around the car.
Similarly we look forward to listen and develop the work with the WP partners, SWOV (Peter van der Knaap), NXP (Gerardo Daalderop, Andrei Terechko), and RDW.
On a broader scale, we hope to contribute to the understanding of network level implications (e.g. MaaS and Hubs (Tom van Woensel), traffic level, logistics systems, V2X), connections with the powertrain design, e.g. Theo Hofman, Steven Wilkins, Mauro Salazar), the human factor (Reint Jan Renes) and other topics in the mobility cluster. I am looking for sharing data, methods, creating links and co-develop.