Seminar: J.-P. Laumond, "On human and humanoid locomotion", June 7 at 15:00
Speaker: Jean-Paul Laumond, LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France
Title: On human and humanoid locomotion
Time and location: Tuesday, June 7, 2011, at 15:00, Aula Magna
Abstract: Walking towards a goal requires to make choices. Why do we choose one trajectory and not another one? Is it because it is the shortest one? the fastest one? the most comfortable? in what sense? What are the laws underlying the formation of locomotor trajectories? The talk will overview a pluridisciplinary approach to the questions. The approach combines computational neuroscience methodology, numerical optimization and robotics research. We will first establish that human locomotion is stereotyped. Then we will introduce the so-called inverse optimal control problem to provide a generic control model of human locomotion. The model is effective: it has been implemented on the humanoid robot platform HRP2. The presentation gathers work done in collaboration with Prof. A. Berthoz (Collège de France, Paris, France) and Prof. K. Mombaur (Heidelberg University, Germany)
Bio: Jean-Paul Laumond (IEEE Fellow) is Directeur de Recherche at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse, France. With his group Gepetto (www.laas.fr/gepetto) he is exploring the computational foundations of anthropomorphic motion. He has been a Coordinator for two European Esprit projects, PROMotion (1992–1995) and MOLOG (1999–2002), both dedicated to robot motion planning technology. During 2001–2002, he created and managed Kineo CAM, a spin-off company from the LAAS-CNRS to develop and market motion planning technology. From 2005 to 2008 he was a co-director of JRL, a French-Japanese CNRS-AIST laboratory dedicated to humanoid robotics. He teaches robotics at the ENSTA and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He published more than 150 papers in international journals and conferences in computer science, automatic control, robotics and neurosciences. He is a member of the IEEE RAS AdCom.