Thomas Feix =fliplr(xieF)
Who am I?!
thomasfeix [at] xief.net
me.xief.net
What I do

Currently, I work as Principal Automation Engineer at CreateMe in the Portland, OR metro area. Within CreateMe we work to revolutionize apparel manufacturing and my role consists of pushing the limits on automated apparel production. Stay tuned for more!

2015 - 2022 I was a Senior Manager Mechanical Engineering in the adidas innovation team, leading the Mechanical Engineering Team (PhD and Ms level). At the time the team was working on key adidas research and development projects. I was the point contact for Robotics and Automation, supporting projects with specific robotic know-how and my established partner network.

Some projects during my tenure were:
  • Strung, a new kind of textile that I was part of the Engineering team.
  • Speedfactory, a robotic shoe factory, winning the German Innovation Award 2018.
  • Adidas 4D, 3D printed midsoles at scale.
  • Adidas Loop, the first shoe that is made for recycling.
  • Boost, a midsole cushioning technology that sold 10s of millions of pairs.


  • 2012-2015 I was a postdoctoral researcher at the  GRAB Lab, Yale University under the supervision of Aaron Dollar. My research centered around human grasping and translating that knowledge onto robotic and prosthetic hands. I looked at human grasping in unstructed environments, in particular with regard to the objects and tasks found during manipulation. Furthermore, I looked at fine manipulation behavior of primate hands and analyzed the precision manipulation workspaces when moving small object within the hand. 

    For my PhD I worked from 2008-2012 at Otto Bock Healthcare GmBH. in Vienna, Austria. I was involved in the European research project GRASP, a robotics project involving different partner universities distributed all over Europe. Within that project I completed my PhD under the supervision of Heinz-Bodo Schmiedmayer from TU Vienna and Danica Kragic from KTH, Stockholm. The title of my PhD thesis is "Anthropomorphic Hand Optimization Based on a Latent Space Analysis". The focus of my work was to evaluate different robotic and prosthetic hands and determine how different kinematics influence the level of anthropormorphism of such hands. I developed a framework that allows to "grade" a kinematic hand model, on how similar its movements are to the human hand.


    Reviewing

    I am still able to do some reviews, however please send me papers that are more related to my current position. For papers that are not relevant to my current job I will be more generous about rejecting reviews. 


    Resources

    Most of PhD work can be found at: grasp.xief.net

    A more formal CV can be found here: CV_EN

    My PhD thesis is here

    My google scholar profile is here

    Finally, some of my private projects are shown at projects.xief.net (partly German).

    Lately, I am exploring creating art with robots. Started to document the process on Instagram.