HEPHAISTOS has been created as a team on January 1st, 2013 and as a project team in 2015.
The goal of the project is to set up a generic methodology for the design and evaluation of an adaptable and interactive assistive ecosystem for the elderly and the vulnerable persons that provides furthermore assistance to the helpers, on-demand medical data and may manage emergency situations. More precisely our goals are to develop devices with the following properties:
they can be adapted to the end-user and to its everyday environment
they should be affordable and minimally intrusive
they may be controlled through a large variety of simple interfaces
they may eventually be used to monitor the health status of the end-user in order to detect emerging pathology
Assistance will be provided through a network of communicating devices that may be either specifically designed for this task or be just adaptation/instrumentation of daily life objects.
The targeted population is limited to people with mobility
impairments
Assistance is a very large field and a single project-team cannot address all the related issues. Hence HEPHAISTOS will focus on the following main societal challenges:
mobility: previous interviews and observations in the HEPHAISTOS team have shown that this was a major concern for all the players in the ecosystem. Mobility is a key factor to improve personal autonomy and reinforce privacy, perceived autonomy and self-esteem
managing emergency situations: emergency situations (e.g. fall) may have dramatic consequences for elderly. Assistive devices should ideally be able to prevent such situation and at least should detect them with the purposes of sending an alarm and to minimize the effects on the health of the elderly
medical monitoring: elderly may have a fast changing trajectory of life and the medical community is lacking timely synthetic information on this evolution, while available technologies enable to get raw information in a non intrusive and low cost manner. We intend to provide synthetic health indicators, that take measurement uncertainties into account, obtained through a network of assistive devices. However respect of the privacy of life, protection of the elderly and ethical considerations impose to ensure the confidentiality of the data and a strict control of such a service by the medical community.
rehabilitation and biomechanics: our goals in rehabilitation are 1) to provide more objective and robust indicators, that take measurement uncertainties into account to assess the progress of a rehabilitation process 2) to provide processes and devices (including the use of virtual reality) that facilitate a rehabilitation process and are more flexible and easier to use both for users and doctors. Biomechanics is an essential tool to evaluate the pertinence of these indicators, to gain access to physiological parameters that are difficult to measure directly and to prepare efficiently real-life experiments
Addressing these societal focus induces the following scientific objectives:
design and control of a network of connected assistive devices: existing assistance devices suffer from a lack of essential functions (communication, monitoring, localization,...) and their acceptance and efficiency may largely be improved. Furthermore essential functions (such as fall detection, knowledge sharing, learning, adaptation to the user and helpers) are missing. We intend to develop new devices, either by adapting existing systems or developing brand-new one to cover these gaps. Their performances, robustness and adaptability will be obtained through an original design process, called appropriate design, that takes uncertainties into account to determine almost all the nominal values of the design parameters that guarantee to obtain the required performances. The development of these devices covers our robotics works (therefore including robot analysis, kinematics, control, ...) but is not limited to them. These devices will be present in the three elements of the ecosystem (user, technological helps and environment) and will be integrated in a common network. The study of this robotic network and of its element is therefore a major focus point of the HEPHAISTOS project. In this field our objectives are:
to develop methods for the analysis of existing robots, taking into account uncertainties in their modeling that are inherent to such mechatronic devices
to propose innovative robotic systems
evaluation, modeling and programming of assistive ecosystem: design of such an ecosystem is an iterative process which relies on different types of evaluation. A large difference with other robotized environments is that effectiveness is not only based on technological performances but also on subjectively perceived dimensions such as acceptance or improvement of self-esteem. We will develop methodologies that cover both evaluation dimensions. Technological performances are still important and modeling (especially with symbolic computation) of the ecosystem will play a major role for the design process, the safety and the efficiency, which will be improved by a programming/communication framework than encompass all the assistance devices. Evaluation will be realized with the help of clinical partners in real-life or by using our experimental platforms
uncertainty management: uncertainties are especially present in all of our activities (sensor, control, physiological parameters, user behavior, ...). We intend to systematically take them into account especially using interval analysis, statistics, game theory or a mix of these tools
economy of assistance: interviews by the HEPHAISTOS team and market analysis have shown that cost is a major issue for the elderly and their family. At the opposite of other industrial sectors manufacturing costs play a very minor role when fixing the price of assistance devices: indeed prices result more from the relations between the players and from regulations. We intend to model these relations in order to analyze the influence of regulations on the final cost
The societal challenges and the scientific objectives will be supported by experimentation and simulation using our development platforms or external resources.
In terms of methodologies the project will focus on the use and mathematical developments of symbolic tools(for modeling, design, interval analysis), on interval analysis, for design, uncertainties management, evaluation), on game theory, for control, localization, economy of assistance) and on control theory. Implementation of the algorithms will be performed within the framework of general purpose software such as Scilab, Maple, Mathematica and the interval analysis part will be based on the existing library ALIAS, that is still being developed mostly for internal use.
Experimental work and the development of our own prototypes are strategic for the project as they allow us to validate our theoretical work and to discover new problems that will feed in the long term the theoretical analysis developed by the team members.
Dissemination is also an essential goal of our activity as its background both on the assistance side and on the theoretical activities as our approaches are not sufficiently known in the medical, engineering and academic communities.
In summary HEPHAISTOS has as major research axes assistance robotics
(see section ),
modeling (see section ), game theory, interval analysis and
robotics (see section ). The coherence of these axis is
that interval analysis
is a major tool to manage the uncertainties that are inherent to a
robotized device, while assistance robotics provides realistic problems which
allow us to develop, test and improve our algorithms. Our overall
objectives are presented in
http://
We are interested in real-valued system solving
(
Solutions are searched within a finite domain (called a box) which may be either continuous or mixed (i.e. for which some variables must belong to a continuous range while other variables may only have values within a discrete set). An important point is that we aim at finding all the solutions within the domain whenever the computer arithmetic will allow it: in other words we are looking for certified solutions. For example, for 0-dimensional system solving, we will provide a box that contains one, and only one, solution together with a numerical approximation of this solution. This solution may further be refined at will using multi-precision.
The core of our methods is the use of interval analysis that
allows one to manipulate mathematical expressions whose unknowns have interval
values. A basic component of interval analysis is the interval
evaluation of an expression. Given an analytical expression
In other words the interval evaluation provides a lower bound of the
minimum of
For example if
The interval evaluation of an expression has interesting properties:
it can be implemented in such a way that the results are guaranteed with respect to round-off errors i.e. property is still valid in spite of numerical errors induced by the use of floating point numbers
if
if
A major drawback of the interval evaluation is that
Fortunately there are methods that allow one to reduce the
overestimation and the overestimation amount decreases with the width of
the ranges. The latter remark leads to the use of a branch-and-bound
strategy in which for a given box a variable range will be bisected,
thereby creating two new boxes that are stored in a list and
processed later
on. The algorithm is complete if all boxes in the list
have been processed, or if during the process a box generates an answer
to the problem at hand (e.g. if we want to prove that
A generic interval analysis algorithm involves the following steps on the current box , , :
exclusion operators: these operators determine that there is no solution to the problem within a given box. An important issue here is the extensive and smart use of the monotonicity of the functions
filters: these operators may reduce the size of the box i.e. decrease the width of the allowed ranges for the variables
existence operators: they allow one to determine the existence of a unique solution within a given box and are usually associated with a numerical scheme that allows for the computation of this solution in a safe way
bisection: choose one of the variable and bisect its range for creating two new boxes
storage: store the new boxes in the list
The scope of the HEPHAISTOS project is to address all these steps in order to find the most efficient procedures. Our efforts focus on mathematical developments (adapting classical theorems to interval analysis, proving interval analysis theorems), the use of symbolic computation and formal proofs (a symbolic pre-processing allows one to automatically adapt the solver to the structure of the problem), software implementation and experimental tests (for validation purposes).
Important note: We have insisted on interval analysis because this is a major componant or our robotics activity. Our theoretical work in robotics is an analysis of the robotic environment in order to exhibit proofs on the behavior of the system that may be qualitative (e.g. the proof that a cable-driven parallel robot with more than 6 non-deformable cables will have at most 6 cables under tension simultaneously) or quantitative. In the quantitative case as we are dealing with realistic and not toy examples (including our own prototypes that are developed whenever no equivalent hardware is available or to very our assumptions) we have to manage problems that are so complex that analytical solutions are probably out of reach (e.g. the direct kinematics of parallel robots) and we have to resort to algorithms and numerical analysis. We are aware of different approaches in numerical analysis (e.g. some team members were previously involved in teams devoted to computational geometry and algebraic geometry) but interval analysis provides us another approach with high flexibility, the possibility of managing non algebraic problems (e.g. the kinematics of cable-driven parallel robots with sagging cables, that involves inverse hyperbolic functions) and to address various types of issues (system solving, optimization, proof of existence ...).
HEPHAISTOS, as a follow-up of COPRIN, has a long-standing tradition of robotics studies, especially for closed-loop robots , especially cable-driven parallel robots. We address theoretical issues with the purpose of obtaining analytical and theoretical solutions, but in many cases only numerical solutions can be obtained due to the complexity of the problem. This approach has motivated the use of interval analysis for two reasons:
the versatility of interval analysis allows us to address issues (e.g. singularity analysis) that cannot be tackled by any other method due to the size of the problem
uncertainties (which are inherent to a robotic device) have to be taken into account so that the real robot is guaranteed to have the same properties as the theoretical one, even in the worst case. This is a crucial issue for many applications in robotics (e.g. medical or assistance robot)
Our field of study in robotics focuses on kinematic issues such as workspace and singularity analysis, positioning accuracy, trajectory planning, reliability, calibration, modularity management and, prominently, appropriate design, i.e. determining the dimensioning of a robot mechanical architecture that guarantees that the real robot satisfies a given set of requirements. The methods that we develop can be used for other robotic problems, see for example the management of uncertainties in aircraft design .
Our theoretical work must be validated through experiments that are
essential for the sake of credibility. A contrario, experiments will
feed theoretical work. Hence HEPHAISTOS works with partners on the
development of real robots but also develops its own prototypes. In
the last years we have developed a large number of prototypes and
we have extended our development to
devices that are not strictly robots but are part of an overall
environment for assistance.
We benefit here from the development of new
miniature, low energy computers with an interface for analog and
logical sensors such as the Arduino or the Phidgets.
The web pages
http://
While the methods developed in the project can be used for a very broad set of application domains (for example we have an activity in CO2 emission allowances ), it is clear that the size of the project does not allow us to address all of them. Hence we have decided to focus our applicative activities on mechanism theory, where we focus on modeling, optimal design and analysis of mechanisms. Along the same line our focus is robotics and especially service robotics which includes rescue robotics, rehabilitation and assistive robots for elderly and handicapped people. Although these topics were new for us when initiating the project we have spent two years determining priorities and guidelines by conducting about 200 interviews with field experts (end-users, praticians, family and caregivers, institutes), establishing strong collaboration with them (e.g. with the CHU of Nice-Cimiez) and putting together an appropriate experimental setup for testing our solutions. A direct consequence of setting up this research framework is a reduction in our publication and contract activities. But this may be considered as an investment as assistance robotics is a long term goal. It must be reminded that we are able to manage a large variety of problems in totally different domains only because interval analysis, game theory and symbolic tools provides us the methodological tools that allow us to address completely a given problem from the formulation and analysis up to the very final step of providing numerical solutions.
strong advances on the analysis of cable-driven parallel robots (section )
collaboration with lawyers on the ethical and legal aspects of robotics
strong collaboration with the medical community on walking analysis and rehabilitation (section )
start of an extensive test period for our walkers in clinical environment (section )
start of the daily activities monitoring in our building (section )
the workshop Computer science for artists
the contract with GénerationRobot for the development of a pedagogical cable-driven parallel robot
J-P. Merlet has been nominated as IEEE Fellow and doctor honoris causae from University Innsbruck. He was also awarded a prize from Cote d'Azur University
Y. Papegay was awarded the Wolfram Innovator Award
Algorithms Library of Interval Analysis for Systems
Functional Description
The ALIAS library whose development started in 1998, is a collection of procedures based on interval analysis for systems solving and optimization.
ALIAS is made of two parts:
ALIAS-C++ : the C++ library (87 000 code lines) which is the core of the algorithms
ALIAS-Maple : the Maple interface for ALIAS-C++ (55 000 code lines). This interface allows one to specify a solving problem within Maple and get the results within the same Maple session. The role of this interface is not only to generate the C++ code automatically, but also to perform an analysis of the problem in order to improve the efficiency of the solver. Furthermore, a distributed implementation of the algorithms is available directly within the interface.
Participants: Odile Pourtallier and Jean-Pierre Merlet
Contact: Jean-Pierre Merlet
URL: http://
We have continued the analysis of
suspended CDPRs for control and design
purposes. For control it is essential to determine the current pose of
the robot for given cable lengths (forward kinematics, FK) and to be
able to calculate the cable lengths for a given pose of the platform
(inverse kinematics, IK). If the cables are supposed to be
non-deformable the IK problem is trivial and has a single solution but
the FK is complex,
admits several solutions and raises several issues. We have shown in
the past that to get all FK solutions for a CDPR with
Even more complex kinematic problems are involved if we assume that the cable are deformable (e.g. are elastic or catenary-like). The cable model is included in the kinematic equations for getting a complete model. We have been interested in the catenary-like model that involves inverse hyperbolic functions and is valid for steel cable of relatively high length. As the IK has never been addressed with such a model we have proposed a solving algorithm that has shown that the IK may have multiple solutions but also may have no solution for poses that are reachable with non-deformable cables. In the same way the DK has several solutions . Finally efficient cables interference detection for sagging cables and the management of modular CDPR, whose geometry may be changed according to the task at hand, have been addressed
Easy to deploy and to reconfigure, dynamically efficient in large workspaces even with payloads, cable-driven parallel robots are very attractive for solving displacement and positioning problems in architectural building at scale 1 and seems to be a good alternative to crane and industrial manipulators in this area.
In a collaboration with CNAM and Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris-Malaquais, we worked on additive manufacturing of building based on ultra-high performance concrete and developed a CDPR as a proof of concept to power a large scale 3D-printer.
A real size industrial robot will be developed by the XtreeE start-up company.
This is now the core of our activity and our work on CDPR is deeply connected to this field as they are an efficient solution for mobility assistance, a high priority for the elderly, helpers and medical community. We have presented our vision of assistance robotics in several occasions , , .
The assessment of elderly frailty is a difficult concept because it
involves the physical capacities of a person and its environment
(health-care services, families, funds...).
We consider the assessment of upper limb capabilities by looking at
the joint torques
where
To test this approach the right upper limb joint torque of 10 males and the force capacity at the right hand was measured by a dynamometer (Biodex III, Biodex Medical Systems) and respectively by a 6-axis load sensor during an experiment performed at HandiBio laboratory. The configuration of the upper limb was measured with a motion capture system (Qualisys, Sweden). The approach is currently being evaluated.
The walkers of the ANG family allow one to determine accurately the trajectory of the walker and therefore to analyze the walking of the user. But these walkers may also be used to assess a rehabilitation process or the progress of an end-user involved in rehabilitation. For that purpose after having identified needs and requirements we developed a new walker ANG-med that used infra-red distance sensors to measure the position of the subject during a rehabilitation exercise. Furthermore the software of this walker has been designed to support a message-passing scheme based on the HOP language of the INDES project team so that the walker may exchange information and control order with an external computer, together with allowing the download of new rehabilitation exercise through the robotics RAPP-store . New exercises are designed as a set of such messages, that may include the calculation of exercise assessment indicators. ANG-med supports various modes: stand-alone (no external connection), passive mode (the walker only report indicator and status using a wifi connection) or full external control (an external computer fully control the walker except for emergency and real-time procedures).
ANG-med has been tested for one month in Centre Héliomarin de Vallauris and is now deployed in the rehabilitation center of MATIA in Spain, as part of the RAPP project. A start-up plan was proposed in November 2014 to transfer the walking analysis technology of HEPHAISTOS with the ANG walker in a company called Euthenia .
Providing appropriate support, services and information to the elderly, to their caregivers and to the medical profession, through a fleet of communicating devices must rely on a structured processes. A generic design and evaluation framework is being elaborated and will be validated through field experiments , , .
Assistance robotics raises many ethical questions. We started reflection about conducting experiments with frail and old people. A listing of questions to be addressed at each step of an experiment has been written (internal document). We have also hired a joint PhD student with University Bologna about the legal aspects of assistance robotics and we have initiated, together with Nathalie <Nevejans from University of Douai, a meeting with the OPECST at the French National Assembly to discuss legal and ethical aspects of robotics.
Both economic motivations due to demographic evolution and willingness of people to live independently at home when aging, facing physical impairment or recovering from injuries has raised the need for activity monitoring at home, in rehabilitation center or in retirement home. Monitoring systems provide information that can range from a broad measure of the daily activity to a precise analysis of the ability of a person performing a task (cooking, dressing, ...) and its evolution.
The broad range of needs and contexts, together with the large variety of available sensors implies the necessity to carefully think the design of the monitoring system. An appropriate system should be inexpensive and forgettable for the monitored person, should respect privacy but collect necessary data, and should easily adapt to stick to new needs. We aim to provide an assisting tool for designing appropriate monitoring systems.
As part of a PhD work, optimal motion planning of a mobile robot with range sensors to locate targets in a room has been studied. Work in progress also include algorithms to deploy infra-red barriers in a large area with several interest places, to be able to locate people. An experimental set-up is in use in the lab and data analysis methods are developed to infer people behaviors.
This activity is the main part of a long-term ongoing collaboration with Airbus whose goal is to directly translate the conceptual work of aeronautics engineers into digital simulators to accelerate aircraft design.
An extensive modeling and simulation platform has been designed which includes a dedicated modeling language for the description of aircraft dynamics models in term of formulae and algorithms, and a symbolic compiler producing as target an efficient numerical simulation code ready to be plugged into a flight simulator, as well as a formatted documentation compliant with industrial requirements of corporate memory .
Technology demonstrated by our prototype has been transferred, final version of our modeling and simulation environment has been delivered to Airbus in November 2012. Developer level know-how has been transferred in 2013 to a software company in charge of industrialization and maintenance of the modeling and simulation environment.
Since 2014, we are working on several enhancements and extension of functionalities, namely to enhance the performances and the numerical quality of the generated C simulation code, and ease the integration of our environment into the airbus toolbox.
We had a short-term collaboration with the Exelsius company devoted to innovative solutions in processes of electronic business and namely conformal coating. Path-planning algorithms have been designed for inclusion in a new machine for selective surface activation based on atmospheric pressure plasma. Transfer of know-how has been covered by a research contract, and by a technology cession.
We have got a grant from the company GénérationRobot to develop a pedagogical cable-driven parallel robot
B. Senach participated in the regional event : Workshop Santé - Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (NICE)
project Le refuge-Lecture: accéssibilité à la compréhension d'un texte pour des personnes en situation de handicap (auditif, visuel, cognitif), Conseil général projet Santé
CPER project MADORSON for the assistance to elderly people (with the STARS project)
the team has been involved for the FHU INOVPAIN : Innovative Solutions in Refractory Chronic Pain that has been labeled in December
Submission to the I-Lab 2015 challenge (prize winner)
Submission to Charles Foix Grant
Submission to the call AUTON (CNRS) with Marc Relieu (Telecom ParisTech) (accepted)
We pursued our actions to valuate technologies developed within HEPHAISTOS project team. The goal is to bring to the market an instrumented walker which provides to its users and to other stakeholder various information about walking performance. This year we proposed the creation of the Inria start-up Euthenia and we submitted to two national challenges. We won a prize for the I-Lab 2015 challenge (30 keuros) and were nominated for the Charles Foix Grant. Our Safe Walker was used as a pilot during the first Summer school of the European Institute of Technology and it was presented in Nice at the opening ceremony the Living Lab "27 Delvalle". For personal reasons the start-up is in stand-by for now but we hope to be able to reactivate it.
Type: COOPERATION
Instrument: Specific Targeted Research Project
Objective: Robotic Applications for Delivering Smart User Empowering Applications
Duration: December 2013-December 2016
Coordinator: CERTH/ITI
Partner: CERTH/ITI(Greece), Inria, WUT (Poland), ORTELIO (UK), ORMYLIA (Greece), INGEMA (Spain)
Inria contact: David Daney, Jean-Pierre Merlet, Manuel Serrano
Abstract: our societies are affected by a dramatic demographic change, in the near future elderly and people requiring support in their daily life will increase and caregivers will not be enough to assist and support them. Socially interactive robots can help to confront this situation not only by physically assisting people but also functioning as a companion. The increasing sales figures of robots are pointing that we are in front of a trend break for robotics. To lower the cost for developers and to increase their interest on developing robotic applications, the RAPP introduces the idea of robots as platforms. RAPP (Robotic Applications for Delivering Smart User Empowering Applications) will provide a software platform in order to support the creation and delivery of robotics applications (RAPPs) targeted to people at risk of exclusion, especially older people. The open-source software platform will provide an API that contains the functionalities for implementing RAPPs and accessing the robot’s sensors and actuators using higher level commands, by adding a middleware stack with added functionalities suitable for different kinds of robots. RAPP will expand the computational and storage capabilities of robots and enable machine learning operations, distributed data collection and processing, and knowledge sharing among robots in order to provide personalized applications based on adaptation to individuals. The use of a common API will assist developers is creating improved applications for different types of robots that target to people with different needs, capabilities and expectations, while at the same time respect their privacy and autonomy, thus the proposed RAPP Store will have a profound effect in the robotic application market. The results of RAPP will be evaluated through the development and benchmarking of social assistive RAPPs, which exploit the innovative features (RAPP API, RAPP Store, knowledge reuse, etc.) introduced by the proposed paradigm.
We have numerous international collaborations but we mention here only the one with activities that go beyond joint theoretical or experimental works:
University of Bologna: 2 joint PhD student, publications
University Innsbruck: joint conference organization
Fraunhofer IPA, Stuttgart: joint conference organization
Duisburg-Essen University: joint conference organization
University of New-Brunswick: 1 joint PhD student
University Laval, Québec: joint book
University of Tokyo: joint conference organization
Tianjin University, China: joint book
We have received our joint PhD student J. Pickard from University of New Brunswick, K. Hanahara from Kobe University while several other scientists from other domains have visited our robotics flat.
J-P. Merlet is a member of the scientific committee of the European Conference on Mechanism Science (EUCOMES), chairman of the scientific Committee of the Computational Kinematics workshop, a member of the steering Committee of IROS
Y. Papegay is a permanent member of the International Steering Committee of the International Mathematica Symposium conferences series, and member of the Program Committee of the edition 2015 held in Prague in January.
J-P. Merlet has been reviewing Editor for IROS 2015.
The members of the team reviewed numerous papers for numerous international conferences.
J-P. Merlet is board member of the Journal of Behavorial Robotics
The members of the team reviewed numerous papers for numerous international journals .
J-P. Merlet has given a talk on assistance robotics at the MESROB, a talk on cable-driven parallel robots in the workshop robotics and biology. He was invited to give a talk at Berkeley for the workshop Algorithmic Human-Computer Interaction.
J-P. Merlet is Inria representative to PPP Eurobotics aisbl. He is a member of the IFToMM (International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science) Technical Committees on History and on Computational Kinematics and has be re-elected as one of the 10 members of IFToMM Executive Council, the board of this federation. He has candidated as President of the Federation. He is a member of the scientific committee of the CNRS GDR robotique and of the CAC of UCA COMUE.
O. Pourtallier is a board member of SeaTech, an Engineering School of University of Toulon.
J-P. Merlet was an HCERES expert for Institut Pascal. He has initiated, together with Nathalie Nevejans from University of Douai, a meeting with the OPECST at the French. He was involved in project evaluations for several foreign funding agencies (Israel, Austria, Finland). He was also appointed as Nominator for the Japan's Prize and interviewed for challenge prizes for the European Commission's Horizon 2020 framework. National Assembly to discuss legal and ethical aspects of robotics. He was a member of the jury of the PhD Award of GDR robotique
B. Senach participated to the Innovative City Convention (June 2015, Nice) and the 1st EIT Health Summer school (Dublin and Barcelona, July 2015)
J-P. Merlet is an elected member of Inria Scientific Council.
Y. Papegay is a member of the Inria CUMIR and of the ADT committee
O. Pourtallier is a member of the Inria CSD (doctoral students monitoring), and is responsible of the Inria NICE committee (long term invited scientists and post-doctoral student selection).
B. Senach participated in the Inria communication action "Graine d'entrepreneur"
Master: J-P. Merlet lectured 8 hours on robotics and connected objects to Master NeuroMoteur (M2) at University Paris Est
Master : O. Pourtallier lectured 6 hours on game theory to Master OSE (M2), at École des Mines de Paris, Sophia Antipolis, France.
PhD: A. Berti, Forward kinematics of cable driven parallel robots, supervisors: M. Carricato, J-P. Merlet
PhD: L. Blanchet, Contribution to modeling of cable-driven parallel robots for command and design, University Nice Sophia Antipolis, supervisor: J-P. Merlet
PhD in Progress : A. Massein, Design of Smart Environment for Human Behaviour Recognition, 2013-2016, supervisors: D.Daney, Y.Papegay
PhD in Progress : K. Bakal, Biomechanics of the upper limb, 2013-2016, supervisors: D. Daney, J-P. Merlet, P. Gorce
PhD in Progress :M. Beninati, Legal aspect of assistance robotics, 2015-2018, supervisor: J-P. Merlet
J-P. Merlet has been the member of the jury of 4 PhD defense and of one HdR
M. Gautier has introduced robotics in a lycée in Aix
J-P. Merlet has presented robotics assistance during an associations meeting organized by the Conseil Général. He has introduced modern robotics to 100 students of preparatory school in Cannes.
Y.Papegay is actively participating to the Math.en.Jeans initiative for Mathematics teaching for undergraduate students. He organized and animated a summer school in experimental mathematics and computer sciences. Two one week sessions have been held in Oxford in June gathering 30 high-school students - most of them were awardees in Mathematics Olympiad
O. Pourtallier has presented our activity to Laurence ROSSIGNOL, Secrétaire d'Etat chargée de la famille, de l’enfance, des personnes âgées et de l’autonomie
the team has exhibited its experimental flat to about 100 visitors
the team has organized a 5 days workshop Computer science for artists. Fours artists have been submitted to a crash curse on the use of sensors and actuation and have proposed a musical/dancing show the last day, based on the use of numerous motors and sensors