Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associate Teams Not Involved in an Inria International Labs

ISI4NAVE

• Title: Innovative Sensors and adapted Interfaces for assistive NAVigation and pathology Evaluation

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • University College London (United Kingdom) - Aspire CREATe - Tom Carlson

• Start year: 2019

• See also: https://team.inria.fr/isi4nave/

• Using a wheelchair allows people with disability to compensate a loss of mobility. However only 5 to 15% of the 70 million people worldwide who require a wheelchair have access to this type of technical aid. In particular, visual, visuo-spatial and/or cognitive impairments can alter the ability of an individual to independently operate a wheelchair safely.

  This project focuses then on two main complementary objectives:

  1. to compensate both sensorimotor disabilities and cognitive impairments by designing adapted interfaces,

  2. to enhance the driving experience and to bring a new tool for rehabilitation purposes by defining efficient physical Human-Robot Interaction.

  In order to ensure a widespread use of robotic systems, innovative interfaces, enabling relevant feedback (medically validated), constitute a major challenge. Trajectory corrections, obtained thanks to an assistance module, will have to be perceived by the user by means of sensitive (visual, tactile…) feedback that will have to be easily adapted to the pathology. Conversely, user interaction with the robotic system can be interpreted to control the wheelchair. Designing such systems require a multidisciplinary study, including medical data collection and analysis.

  In our preliminary works, we demonstrated the relevance of share control frameworks. The scope of this new ISI4NAVE Associate Team is then to provide advanced and innovative solutions for controlling wheelchair as well as providing appropriate and relevant feedback to users.

Participation in Other International Programs

ACRV

François Chaumette is one of the five external experts of the Australian Center for Robotic Vision (see http://roboticvision.org). This center groups QUT in Brisbane, ANU in Canberra, Monash University and Adelaide University. In the scope of this project, Alexander Oliva received a grant to participate to the 2019 Robotic Vision Summer School in Kioloa (New South Wales) and spent a 1-week visit at QUT in March 2019.