Speakers

Talk Title

Physical Human-Robot Interaction and collaboration:

Toward an Increasing Consideration of Human System Modeling and Estimation

ABSTRACT of the TALK

Human-robot interaction and collaboration constitute a promising and challenging field of robotics research and may bring several positive impacts and transformation in factory of future and industry 4.0. Human-Robot interaction can be just a space sharing by avoiding collision, or a collision handling by appropriately controlling the robot reaction, or a more complex and collaborative task made by both. In this context, the physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) is one of the most challenging in terms of human safety, efficiency and comfort for human. These aspects are crucial for the human to increase the acceptability of the interaction and of the collaboration with robots in different domains (medical, rehabilitation, industrial, domestic and so on).

One of these complex tasks can be a co-manipulation (between human and robot) of heavy, bulky or flexible and deformable object which can be a product, a tool or another human. This requires an appropriate robot with possibly additional mechatronic system on it, and performant control strategies that account for the interaction forces.

On the other hand, an efficient human-robot interaction requires, beyond the robotic system, the knowledge, estimation and prediction of the human system. Indeed, to consider a certain number of issues related to the interaction stability, safety, human ergonomics and comfort, and uncertainties, the human should be considered more deeply as system than just an external perturbation force.

This talk will address different aspects and issues of physical human-robot interaction and collaboration for object co-manipulation by focusing on robotic control that considers the human-object-robot interaction as a whole system, which can be entirely modeled, measured and partially or completely controlled. A particular focus will be made on the compliant control techniques such as impedance and admittance-based control. In our approaches, we assume the human as the leader of the interaction, where the robot trajectory is not predefined and the knowledge and prediction of human system behavior still remain important issues. Other aspects such as interaction stability and the interaction and collaboration assessment will be addressed as well.

Keywords: Tasks validation, Virtual reality, joint task and motion planning, interactive and immersive simulation, ontologies, human-in-the-loop, physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) and collaboration (pHRC).

BIO

Dr Mourad BENOUSSAAD is an associate professor at INP Toulouse, ENIT (Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieur de Tarbes) and LGP Lab (Laboratoire Génie de Production). Born in 1979, he prepared a PhD at LIRMM Lab (INRIA-UM2-CNRS) and he received a PhD in Robotics and Control Theory from Science University of Montpellier (France) in 2009. He was a postdoc researcher at The University of Tokyo (JSPS-Japan) in 2010-2011 and then a postdoc researcher at Heidelberg University (Germany) during 2012-2013. In 2013-2014, Dr. M. Benoussaad joined LIRMM Lab (INRIA-UM2-CNRS) as a researcher in Robotics Lab. During his research, he worked mainly on robotics, biomechanics and human motion and optimization techniques. In 2014 he joined INP-ENIT and Laboratoire Génie de Production (LGP) as an associate professor. Dr Benoussaad is a member of the "Dynamic Decision and Interoperability for Systems" team and particularly the "Robotics, Virtual Reality and Vision" (R2V2) group. His actual research mainly focuses on Physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) in context of collaborative robotics (cobotics) and active exoskeleton. He also works on human motion and control of human musculoskeletal system. Dr Benoussaad is author and co-author of more than 13 papers in international journals and conferences in Robotics and rehabilitation engineering.