Research interests

My research interests focus on the generation of generic and safe motions for complex systems such as humanoid robots, human avatars, hexapod robots, ....

Associate Professor Position in MACCS Team from 2013

From september 2013 I am an Associate professor in the University Blaise Pascal in Clermont Ferrand (France). I give lectures in Poltech Clermont Ferrand and I do my research in the MACCS Team (Modeling, Autonomy and Control in Complex Systems), of the ISPR axis (ImageS, Perception systems and Robotics) in the Pascal Institute (UMR6602 CNRS / UBP / IFMA))

Post Doctoral position in Explore Team in France (2012-2013)

From September 2012 to August 2013, I joined the R.HEX project of the EXPLORE team of the LIRMM. This project is located in the University Institute of Technology of Beziers and aims at designing, building and controlling an open source and open hardware hexapod robot.

Post Doctoral position in Germany (2011-2012)

In October 2011, I started a position in the Institute for Anthropmatics (Humanoids and Intelligence Systems Lab, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)), directed by Tamim Asfour and supported by grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). I started to write the kinematic and dynamic model of the new ARMAR-IV robot from the Pro-Engineering datas. I continued to collaborate with the DEMAR team on the impact of the electrical stimulation during the sitting pivot transfer of paraplegian people. I also worked on the Master Motor Map (MMM) framework that is a reference model to describe and reproduce human motions. This framework consist in fitting the kinematic motion to the MMM model, retrieve the contact points and reproduce this motion on humanoid robots.

Post Doctoral position in Japan (2009-2011)

Then, I did a two-years Post-Doc supported by JSPS (Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science) in the Joint Robotics Laboratory (Tsukuba Japan) with Abderrahmane Kheddar and Eiichi Yoshida on the generation of optimal dynamic multi-contact motion. I proposed a method to deal with continuous constraints during the optimization process and also developped a method to compute analytically the contact forces in the case of multi-contact motions. This Work was presented in New scientist and by the news agency : Reuters .

Ph.D (2006-2009)

I did my Ph.D with Philippe Fraisse and Nacim Ramdani in the INRIA DEMAR team and worked on planning and fast re-planning of safe motions. Based on interval analysis, I proposed the time interval discretization that allows to satisfy the physical limits of the robot during whole the motion duration. Since the computation did not allow real time otpimization, I presented a method to re-plan motions. I successfully replanned a kicking motion within less than one second of CPU time




Keywords : Humanoid Robots, Hexapod Robots, Optimization, Motion Planning, Feasible sets, Multi-contact.