Projects Teams

DEMAR (DEambulation and ARtificial Movement )
Keywords: Modeling and control of human sensorimotor systems, neuroprosthetics

The DEMAR project is organized around three main research directions:
- Modeling of the sensor-motor system: modeling and identification
- Synthesis and control of movement and physiological functions: synthesis and simulation, control
- Artificial-life interfaces: stimulators, sensors for monitoring and communication
Target objectives are to:
- Understand and quantify motor disorders objectively
- Find palliative solutions for motor deficiencies
Extending beyond the LIRMM, this transversal project (involving the robotics and microelectronics departments), also involves INRIA-Sophia Antipolis Méditerranée and University of Montpellier 1.

Facts and figures 2005-2008
DEXTER (Design and Control of Robots for Manipulation)
Keywords: Design, control, handling, parallel robotics, medical robotics

The DEXTER team has clearly chosen to focus on mechatronics in order to design, create and control efficient and robust robots capable of carrying out precise and/or fast movements, with the goal of combining activities related to fundamental research with realistic experimental validation that can be promoted to the industry. Scientific themes include defining design methodology, developing estimation protocols, and synthesizing sensor-referenced controls (effort/vision) and/or models (predictive). The team’s main contributions in this area are related to two principal fields:
- Medical robotics, ranging from assisting people to assisting surgeons
- Parallel robotics, including redundancy and/or high angular clearance
Recently, the team also began to explore new fields of study, such as sub-actioned prehensors and biped robots.

Facts and figures 2005-2008
ICAR (Image and Interaction)
Keywords: Image, signal, vision, video, 3-D objects, graphical informatics, visualization and interaction

The ICAR team focuses its activities on three main scientific directions, associating image and interaction for processing visual data such as images, video and 3-D objects:
- Analysis and processing
- Coding and protection
- Modeling and visualization
These three thematic topics encompass a wide range of theoretical and application development possibilities. The main fields of application include medicine, cultural heritage (art and paleontology), security, robotics, agronomics and industrial manufacturing.

Facts and figures 2005-2008
IDH (Interactive Digital Humans)
Keywords: Robotic Humanoids, Virtual Mannequins, Haptics, Cognitive Interaction Models, Position/Force/Vision Control, Dynamic Operation

The goal of the Digital Interactive Humans project is to study human-inspired cybernetic systems. The core of the research work being carried out by the team follows two complementary and coordinated directions:
- virtual humanoids - for advanced virtual prototyping systems,
- robotic humanoids - such as those that one can imagine performing various services where space is shared with real humans (e.g. home automation services).
We emphasize functional and cognitive mathematical models dictated by interaction (therefore including the ability to communicate with a partner or the environment). This involves understanding and translating nature and the origin of human actions, their decomposition into movements, the dynamics of these movements, their links with perception, imitation methods and their transposition onto virtual and robotic humanoids, etc.

The IDH project is based on the following four research areas:
- Modeling and haptic interaction,
- Human/robot and/or human/avatar cooperation,
- Planning and generating acyclic movement,
- Active multi-model perception.
Facts and figures 2005-2008
NERO (NEtworked RObots)
Keywords: control, perception, guidance, navigation, planning, control architecture, fleet control, sub-marine, land and humanoid robots

This project focuses on issues related to the collaborative control of submarine and/or land-based vehicles. This includes studying and developing control strategies involving a variety of dynamic, cinematic and static constraints such as:
- Robustness of control rules with respect to outside interference and modeling errors
- Maintaining vehicle fleet geometry
- Obstacle avoidance
- Non-supervised control learning
- Maintaining communication links between vehicles
- Trajectory monitoring
- Localisation and SLAM
- Vision and perception (sweeping ultrasound) for control
- Multi-vehicle perception
These strategies provide both local and global solutions, making it particularly necessary to study aspects concerning automatic task switching, as well as hardware and software architecture related to these control rules in general.

In addition, our objectives include achieving higher decision making autonomy for fleets of robots by integrating planning mechanisms, resource management, and task scheduling within each robot’s local controller. Lastly, we plan to verify properties in order to ensure a reasonable level of reliability for complex software and hardware architectures.

Facts and figures 2005-2008
projets

ROB Department Research Projects