Simple haptics observers for humanoids and human

Abstract:

Humanoid robots can serve as human partners in various close-contact situations. As real-use application perspectives appeared recently (domotics, large-scale manufacturing…), humanoids have great potential to be exploited as sophisticated assistive or cobotic systems. Their shape imparts them interesting properties in terms of integration, interaction with humans, empathy, and embodiment. As a key element in human-humanoid physical interaction is the detection of contacts (desired or non-desired ones). My talk we review our recent developments and views in tools in challenging this problem using only minimal sensor setting and also some larger view of the problem of inferring contact forces without using classical force sensing devices.

Abderrahmane Kheddar received the BS in Computer Science degree from the Institut National d’Informatique (ESI), Algiers, the MSc and Ph.D. degree in robotics, both from the University of Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. He is presently Directeur de Recherche at CNRS and the Codirector of the CNRS-AIST Joint Robotic Laboratory (JRL), UMI3218/RL, Tsukuba, Japan. He is also leading the Interactive Digital Humans (IDH) team at CNRS-University of Montpellier LIRMM, France. His research interests include haptics, humanoids and recently thought-based control using brain machine interfaces. He is a founding member of the IEEE/RAS chapter on haptics, the co-chair and founding member of the IEEE/RAS Technical committee on model-based optimization, he is a member of the steering committee of the IEEE Brain Initiative, Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and within the editorial board of some other robotics journals; he is a founding member of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics and served in its editorial board during three years (2007-2010). He is an IEEE senior member and titular full member of the National Academy of Technology of France and recently knight of the national order of merits of France.