Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

• Claudio Pacchierotti has been elected Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics for the term 2018-2020. He also published a review paper on the topic of wearable haptic devices for the hand [29].

• Julien Pettré will coordinate the H2020 ICT 25 EUropean Project CrowdBot starting from January 2018. The project gathers 5 academic partners - UCL (UK), EPFL and ETHZ (Switzerland), RWTH (Germany) and Inria (France) - as well as 2 industrial partners - Locomotec GmbH (Germany) and SoftBank Robotics (France). The project will address the navigation of robots in crowded environment. While having robot moving in crowds can be of crucial importance (e.g., semi-autonomous wheelchairs), the project will design new robot navigation techniques that minimize the risk of negative impact raised by the presence of the robot (traffic perturbation, collision, etc.).

• Lagadic was a member of the five finalist teams for the KUKA Innovation Award (https://www.kuka.com/en-de/press/events/kuka-innovation-award), together with the RIS group at LAAS (coordinator), the University of Siena, Italy, and the Seoul National University, South Korea. The goal was to address search and rescue operations in regions which are difficult to access or dangerous following disasters. For this, the team explored the collaboration between a quadrotor UAV and a KUKA lightweight arm for cooperative transportation and manipulation of rigid objects (e.g., long bards), with a final peg-in-hole task demonstrated live at the Hannover fair in April 2017.