Please register for the seminar here: https://forms.office.com/r/JQVsPSwirD

Abstract:

A central challenge in assistive and collaborative robotics is to design human-centred controllers that adapt to each operator rather than enforce stereotyped behaviours. After a brief overview of LAAS-CNRS, CNRS’s flagship laboratory, I will outline three pillars that enable seamless physical interaction. First, accurate, real-time estimation of the human kinodynamic state for safe contact, leveraging recent advances in inertial measurement units and markerless pose estimation. Second, prediction of future human motion and intent in an explainable and safe manner, building on the history of Inverse Optimal Control and Inverse Reinforcement Learning and presenting new extensions that fuse multi-modal signals and encode task constraints. Third, efficient calibration of human and robot models to shrink the sim-to-real gap, via optimal geometric and dynamic identification methods tailored to anthropomorphic systems. I will discussing perspectives for solving open problems in robustness, uncertainty quantification, and actual deployment.

Biography:

Vincent Bonnet received the Ph.D. degree in automatic control and robotics from the University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France, in 2009. From 2010 to 2012, he was a postdoctoral researcher in biomechanics and human motion analysis at the University of Rome “Foro Italico,” Rome, Italy. From 2013 to 2016, he was with the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT), Tokyo, Japan. He received a French ministerial doctoral research scholarship and two fellowships from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). From 2016 to 2020, he was an Associate Professor at Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC), France where he received the innovation talent price from Ile-de-France in 2018. Since 2021, he has been an Associate Professor at the University of Toulouse and a member of the GEPETTO team at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse. Since 2024 he is an adjunct visiting associate professor at the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore and member of the French-Singaporean international laboratory IPAL. His research interests include various aspects of low-cost sensing, human motion analysis and prediction, humanoid robotics, system identification, and control.