At the 2023 National days of Robotics Research, the Research Group in Robotics, awarded its thesis prizes to young robotics researchers whose work has advanced research through contributions to the advancement of scientific and technical knowledge.

For 2022, the second GdR Robotique prize was awarded to Isabelle Moranger, formerly PhD student within the Gepetto team at LAAS-CNRS. Her awarded thesis, entitled "Transport de charge homme-robot", was supervised by Bruno Watier and Olivier Stasse, researchers in the same team as part of the ANR Cobot project (also coordinated by Bruno).

The aim of Isabelle's thesis was to develop a collaborative table transport system involving a human and a TALOS-type humanoid robot, named Pyrène. The work focused on two main areas: biomechanics and robotics. Indeed, for a robot to best help a human, the PhD student felt it necessary to control and plan the robot's actions according to the behavior of its human partner, and to study the latter. This is why part of this thesis was dedicated to understanding and modeling human walking trajectories during table transport, so that the robot could anticipate its partner's behavior during this human-robot interaction.

In this context, she worked on the development of a model to predict the trajectories of the centers of mass of two human subjects carrying a table. The other part was devoted to planning the robot's steps in real time and controlling it so that it could carry the table with a human (lift the table and walk with it).

Read (french only) the news article on site de CNRS Sciences informatiques.

©Gepetto/LAAS-CNRS