Talk title:
Modeling and control of the whole human-robot system for interaction and co-manipulation

ABSTRACT of the TALK
The human-robot interaction and collaboration is a promising and challenging field of robotics research. Human-Robot interaction tasks can be made for sharing space by avoiding collision, handling collision or for more complex and collaborative tasks. In this context, the physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) is one of the most challenging in terms of human safety, efficiency and comfort for human. These aspects are crucial for acceptability by human of the interaction and the collaboration with robots in different domains (medical, rehabilitation, industrial, domestic and so on).

This physical interaction tasks can be without or with a co-manipulated object or tool, where the human and robot are in a permanent physical interaction, and may involve a flexibility of objects or human body in interaction. All these require handling interaction forces though a robotics force control strategies.

On others hand, an efficient human-robot interaction requires, beyond the robotic system, the knowledge, estimation and prediction of the human system as well. This talk will address different aspects and issues of physical human-robot interaction and object co-manipulation by considering the human-robot system as a whole system, which can be entirely modeled, measured and controlled partially or completely. A particular focus will be made on the compliant control techniques such as impedance and admittance based control. Since our approaches assume the human as the leader of the interaction, where the robot trajectory is not predefined, the knowledge and prediction of human system behavior still remain important issues. Other aspects such as interaction stability and the interaction and collaboration assessment will be addressed as well.


BIO
Dr. Mourad BENOUSSAAD is an associate professor at INP Toulouse, ENIT (Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieur de Tarbes) and LGP Lab (Laboratoire Génie de Production). Born in 1979, he prepared a PhD at LIRMM Lab (INRIA-UM2-CNRS) and he received a PhD in Robotics and Control Theory from Science University of Montpellier (France) in 2009.

He was a postdoc researcher at The University of Tokyo (JSPS-Japan) in 2010-2011 and then a postdoc researcher at Heidelberg University (Germany) during 2012-2013. In 2013-2014, Dr. M. Benoussaad joined LIRMM Lab (INRIA-UM2-CNRS) as a researcher in Robotics Lab. During his research, he worked mainly on robotics, biomechanics and human motion and optimization techniques.

In 2014 he joined INP-ENIT and Laboratoire Génie de Production (LGP) as an associate professor. Dr Benoussaad is a member of the "Dynamic Decision and Interoperability for Systems" team and particularly the "Robotics, Virtual Reality and Vision" (R2V2) group. His actual research mainly focuses on Physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) in context of collaborative robotics (cobotics) and active exoskeleton. He also works on human motion and control of human musculoskeletal system. Dr Benoussaad is author and co-author of more than 13 papers in international journals and conferences in Robotics and rehabilitation engineering.