Interactive Digital Human

Human element plays a key role in almost all industrial systems. It constitutes also a component that influences the global performances when interacting with the systems. This situation becomes critical when interactions involve the sense of touch (close contacts, force feedback, etc.).

“Interactive Digital Humans (IDH)” project focuses its researches on cybernetic systems inspired from human behaviour. This project aims at better understanding haptic interactions between humans and systems. Two main axes constitute the core of the studies and developments performed inside IDH: the virtual humanoids (avatars) that play an important role for virtual prototyping, and the humanoid robots developed to perform tasks involving humans such that personal assistance, etc.

We are developing computational models based on functional and cognitive analysis of interactions. Our objective is to better understand and represent the nature and the origin of human actions, their decomposition into movements, the dynamics and the control of movements, the coupling with perception, and the transposition of such models on virtual humanoids and humanoids robots. Such models are useful for designing and operating systems that interact with humans.

Researches include the following topics:

• Haptic interactions and Human/Humanoid modeling,

• Humanoid robot control,

• Cooperation human/robot and/or human/avatar,

• Planning support contact-points for humanoid robot,

• Active multimodal perception.