On 26 May, RoboValley will host a very first edition of our new online meeting format, RoboCafé Online, focusing on personal stories straight from the cutting edge of robotics development. This time, our main topic is the story OperationAIR, the non-profit student team of the TU Delft that has developed an easy producible emergency ventilator, called AIRone.

They will perform a live demo of their solution, showing you how victims of the corona virus are treated with this ventilator during hospitalisation. Its name AIRone already hints at its main function; it helps patients breathe by pumping extra oxygen in their weakened lungs.

After testing and re-testing this machine is now ready for the market. At the height of the Corona outbreak the team received hundreds of orders from across the country and got visited by the Dutch prime minister.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte visiting the OperationAIR team last April (photo credit: Nia Palli)

On 26 May team members will share their inside story of what they have learnt from developing at breakneck speed with 50 students from multidisciplinary backgrounds, together with specialists of Leiden University Medical Center and Erasmus Medical Center.

The whole process took up only a short 5 weeks, starting off with an open call from one of the professors from TU Delft. Since then there has been widespread interest from other countries for the AIRone. Design and documentation have been shared by now as open source.

Interested in joining and knowing more? RoboCafé Online streams live from the RoboHouse fieldlab on the TU Delft Campus. As a 30 minute hosted Zoom call with one innovator and room for questions, the event creates an informal get-together for all of us interested in robotics, AI and people-machine collaboration. More information on the other dates will be announced soon!