My interests mainly reside in assistive robotics. I am particularly interested in investigating requirements and developing technologies for prosthetic devices such that they competitively substitute lost resources of the users.  The projects I am currently engaged in are:

♣  Dynamical Coupling in Motor-Sensory Function Substitution. In a prosthetic hand system, my research is about seeking efficient methods to send sensory information back to the body.  Our endeavors consist in developing tactile sensing and display systems which exploit morphology as a way to encode exteroceptive stimuli and relay enriched information to the users.

♣   Cyborg plant. Under biologically environmental stress conditions, a robotic device contributes to restoring a healthy stable state of an avocado plant by reading biological and morphological cues from the plant and subsequently compensating with the missing resource (http://www.cyborgplant.com/, VIDEO).

Refereed Journal Articles:

Dana D. Damian, Alejandro Hernandez Arieta, Harold Roberto Martinez Salazar and  Rolf Pfeifer (2011) Slip Speed Sensory Feedback  for Prosthetic Applications  (accepted with condition)

Dana D. Damian, Dominique Cadosch,  PoTing Huang, Shuhei Miyashita, Atsushi Aoyama, Michael Ammann and Rolf Pfeifer (2011) (under review)

Book chapters:

Alejandro Hernandez‐Arieta, Dana D. Damian (2010) Body awareness in prosthetic hands,Distributed Diagnosis and Home Healthcare: Rehabilitation, Epilepsy and Autism, Vol. III, WorldScientific Publisher (submitted)

Alejandro Hernandez-Arieta, Konstantinos Dermitzakis, Dana D. Damian, Max Lungarella and Rolf Pfeifer (2008) Sensory-motor coupling in rehabilitation robotics. Handbook of Service Robotics, I-Tech Education and Publishing, pp. 21-36

Refereed Conference Articles:

Dana D. Damian, Marvin Ludersdorfer, Yeongmi Kim, Alejandro Hernandez Arieta, Rolf Pfeifer and Allison Okamura (2011) Wearable Haptic Device for Cutaneous Force and Slip Feedback, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (accepted) 

Marvin Ludersdorfer, Dana D. Damian, Alejandro Hernandez Arieta, Rolf Pfeifer and Allison Okamura (2011) Force Feedback via Shaped Contacts, International Conference on Morphological Computation (ICMC)      

           
Dana D. Damian, Alejandro Hernandez Arieta and Allison M. Okamura (2011)  Design and Evaluation of a Multi-Modal Haptic Skin Stimulation Apparatus, International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)

Dominique Cadosch,  PoTing Huang, Dana D. Damian, Shuhei Miyashita, Atsushi Aoyama, Michael Ammann and Rolf Pfeifer (2011) Attempt on Plant Machine Interface. Working Towards Self-monitoring Plant Systems, IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 

Dana D. Damian, Harold Martinez, Konstantinos Dermitzakis, Alejandro Hernandez Arieta and Rolf Pfeifer (2010) Artificial Ridged Skin for Slippage Speed Detection in Prosthetic Hand Applications, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Taipei, Taiwan [pdf] 

Dana D. Damian, Alejandro Hernandez-Arieta, Max Lungarella and Rolf Pfeifer (2009) An Automated Metrics Set for Mutual Adaptation between Human and Robotic Device, International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR), Kyoto, Japan, pp. 139-147 [pdf] 

Dan Ciresan, Dana Damian (2006) Preserving Topological Information in the Windowed Hough Transform for Rectangle Extraction, DAGM-Symposium, Berlin, Germany, pp. 172-181

Refereed Short Conference Articles:

Dominique Cadosch, Mathias Boeller, Michael Ammann, Dana D. Damian, Shuhei Miyashita and Rolf Pfeifer (2010) Attempt Towards the Cyborg-Plant. Robotic Response to Water Stress in Avocados, International Conference on Cognitive Systems (CogSys), Zurich, Switzerland

Dana D. Damian and Konstantinos Dermitzakis (2010) Morphological design for a prosthetic hand: bone curvature and ridged skin, International Conference on Cognitive Systems (CogSys), Zurich, Switzerland

Dana D. Damian, Markus Cadonau, Konstantinos Dermitzakis and Alejandro Hernandez-Arieta (2009) Grip Stabilization of a Robot Hand through a Ridged Artificial Skin, Workshop on Tactile Sensing, IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoids, Paris, France

Technical Reports:

Dana D. Damian (2007) Human Emotion Recognition using Body Modality Analysis,University of Amsterdam, Diploma Thesis

Misc

Alejandro Hernandez Arieta, Konstantinos Dermitzakis, Dana Damian (2010). Sensory Feedback for body awareness in prosthetic applications. The Neuromorphic Engineer. A publication of INE-ORG. DOI10.2417/1201004.002880

Assistant in:

§ Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 2007/2008, 2008/2009, 2010/2011. Lecturer: Rolf Pfeifer

§ Neural Networks 2008. Lecturer: Rolf Pfeifer

§ Artificial Life 2009. Lecturer: Ruedi Füchslin

Open Projects for Students (NEW):

We are calling for motivated students in our projects on tactile feedback for robot hand wearers:

Multi-tactile feedback device for robot hand wearers (Internship/Bachelor thesis/Master thesis)

Awards:

§ Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Fellowship for Prospective Researchers (2010)

§ DAAD Undergraduate Student scholarship (2007)

§ Erasmus Mundus scholarship (2006)

 § Politehnica Timisoara University - Merit Scholarship (2002-2007)