Section: Research Program

Synthesis and Control of Human Functions

Participants : Christine Azevedo Coste, Philippe Fraisse, Mitsuhiro Hayashibe, David Andreu.

We aim at developping realistic solutions for real clinical problems expressed by patients and medical staff. Different approaches and specifications are developped to answer those issues in short, mid or long terms. This research axis is therefore obviously strongly related to clinical application objectives. Even though applications can appear very different, the problematic and constraints are usually similar in the context of electrical stimulation: classical desired trajectory tracking is not possible, robustness to disturbances is critical, possible observations of system are limited. Furthermore there is an interaction between body segments under voluntary control of the patient and body segments under artificial control. Finally, this axis relies on modelling and identification results obtained in the first axis and on the technological solutions and approaches developped in the third axis (Neuroprostheses). The robotics framework involved in DEMAR work is close to the tools used and developped by BIPOP team in the context of bipedal robotics. There is no national team working on those aspects. Within international community, several colleagues carry out researches on the synthesis and control of human functions, most of them belong to the International Functional Electrical Stimulation Society (IFESS) community. In the following we present two sub-objectives. Concerning spinal cord injuries (SCI) context not so many team are now involved in such researches around the world. Our force is to have technological solutions adapted to our theoretical developments. Concerning post-stroke context, several teams in Europe and North America are involved in drop-foot correction using FES. Our team specificity is to have access to the different expertises needed to develop new theoretical and technical solutions: medical expertise, experimental facilities, automatic control expertise, technological developments, industrial partner. These expertises are available in the team and through strong external collaborations.