Speakers

Talk Title

Virtual Reality and interactive and immersive planning for assistance to manipulation

ABSTRACT of the TALK

In industry, whereas the economic competition increases, up-to-date industrial products are more and more integrated and the tasks related to their lifecycle (assembly, maintenance, disassembly…) have to be performed under sometimes very strong geometric constraints. In the context of Industry 4.0 (Factory of the Future) and PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), industrial companies therefore express the needs to validate these tasks from design stage on, in order to be able to update the design of these products (before manufacturing the physical prototypes) if needed. Such an approach allows to reduce development time and cost, to detect errors as early as possible, and to target more environment friendly development processes. When simulating such complex scenarios, it is necessary to deal with the relative positioning or to the movement of objects and of resources (machines, robots, human operators) that manipulate them. A key issue is then to find a path, a trajectory, a movement to show the feasibility of scenarios and simulate what the execution of a task will be.

Our works deal with the assistance to the simulation and validation of such complex scenarios in Virtual Reality. We present the original scientific approach on which these works are based: the joint use of motion planning and VR techniques to validate the feasibility of the movement for the simulated scenarios in an interactive and immersive way, with visuo-haptic guidance to the human operator in the loop. The initial approach was based on the use of purely geometric models. In order to improve the relevance of the assistance and the modalities of interaction and control sharing (authority sharing and intents detection) between the VR platform and the human operator, we then considered higher abstraction level (topological and semantic) data than the purely geometrical data traditionally used. Finally, for a better, task- or trade-oriented assistance, and in order to move from the "virtual experience" to the "trade-oriented experience", our work now targets the development of joint, interactive and immersive task and path planning strategies.

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. Philippe FILLATREAU graduated from the ENSEEIHT Engineering School in 1988. He obtained his PhD in perception for mobile robotics in 1994 at the LAAS-CNRS Laboratory, Toulouse, France. His PhD works, funded by the Framatome Company, dealt with perception, 3D environment modelling and localization for an autonomous all-terrain mobile robot, in the framework of joint projects dealing with public safety or planetary exploration. In 1991–92 he spent one year at the Matra Marconi Space (now Airbus Group Defence & Space) Company, where he was involved in the european Eureka-AMR project. In 1994–95, he was a post-doctoral visiting researcher at the Department of A.I. of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland; funded by a Human Capital and Mobility fellowship of the European Community, his works dealt with non polyhedral objects recognition and model update for public safety mobile robots. In 1996, Philippe Fillatreau joined the Delta Technologies Sud-Ouest Company (Toulouse) where he was technical head of the computer vision activities. There, he lead industrial projects often related to quality control on production lines and of industrial processes, and research projects in the fields of Computer Vision and Algorithm Architecture Adequacy, aiming at integrating advanced image processing algorithms in smart cameras based on FPGAs for very high throughput applications (e.g. transports safety, on-board satellite images processing or quality control of industrial processes). In 2009, he joined the National Engineering School of Tarbes as a researcher and lecturer. His current research interests are related to Virtual Reality (interactive task and path planning for the validation of complex tasks / scenarios), Computer Vision, Mobile Robotics and HW/SW co-design. Targeted applications include Industry 4.0 (validation of complex tasks / scenarios from design stage on, digital twin) or Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Philippe FILLATREAU teaches software and real-time programming, computer vision and critical embedded systems, and also project management and quality.