Christian Vassallo
Email: Christian.Vassallo@laas.fr |
About Me
My thesis is part of the international research project “KoroiBot”, in collaboration with scientists from seven institutions in Germany, France, Israel, Italy and Netherlands.
Engineering at the University of Genoa, Italy. The collaboration with the EMARO programme gave me the possibility to be part of the ERASMUS program, completing my education at École Centrale de Nantes and the IRCCyN lab in France where I worked on my final project "Human to humanoid kinematic motion convertion based on virtual markers tracking". Here, I discovered my interest for the research.
Current Position
the humanoid robots HRP-2 and Romeo of LAAS-CNRS. The research is based on mathematical models and methods, in particular way on optimization and learning techniques.
human in order to identify the motion principles for the generation and online control the robot gaits in various situations. The development of adequate rules for transferring human principles and movements to humanoid models and the application of optimization and learning based control approaches will allow a versatile, efficient and robust walking.
Thesis Summary
This thesis has been done within the framework of the European Project Koroibot which aims at developing ad- vanced algorithms to improve the humanoid robots locomotion. It is organized in three parts.
Part 1: How humans avoid moving obstacle crossing their way?
Study: Identification of walking strategies for avoiding a moving obstacle
Context: KoroiBot Project, Work Package 1
Collaborators: INRIA-Rennes, MimeTIC Research Team and University of Rennes 2, M2S Lab.
Summary
With the aim of steering robots in a safe and efficient manner among humans it is required to understand the rules, principles and strategies of human during locomotion and transfer them to robots. The goal of this thesis is to investigate and identify the human
locomotion strategies and create algorithms that could be used to improve robot capabilities. A first contribution is the
analysis on pedestrian principles which guide collision avoidance strategies. In particular, we observe how humans adapt
a goal-direct locomotion task when they have to interfere with a moving obstacle crossing their way. We show differences
both in the strategy set by humans to avoid a non-collaborative obstacle with respect to avoid another human, and the
way humans interact with an object moving in human-like way.
Part 2: Learning Movement Primitives for the Humanoid Robot HRP-2
Study: ''Use of motion primitives to implement complex movements on humanoid robots
Context: KoroiBot Project, Work Package 2
Partners: University Clinic Tübingen, Department of Cognitive Neurology.''
Summary
In this part we present a work done in collaboration with
computational neuroscientists from Tubingen, Germany. We propose a new approach to synthetize realistic complex humanoid robot movements
with motion primitives. Human walking-to-grasp trajectories have been recorded. The whole body movements are retargeted and scaled in order to match the humanoid robot kinematics. Based on this database of movements, we extract the
motion primitives. We prove that these sources signals can be expressed as stable solutions of an autonomous dynamical system, which can be regarded as a system of coupled central pattern generators (CPGs). Based on this approach, reactive walking-to-grasp strategies have been developed and successfully experimented on the humanoid robot HRP at LAAS-CNRS.
Video: https://cloud.laas.fr/index.php/s/aOk0kl5EqkVelAt
Part 3: The geometry of confocal curves for passing through a door
Study: Vision-based control to pass through a door
Context: ERC Actanthrope
Partners: Internal collaboration at LAAS-CNRS with Paolo Salaris and Jean-Paul Laumond.
Summary
In the third contribution of the thesis, we present a new approach to the problem of vision-based steering of robot
subject to non-holonomic constrained to pass through a door. The door is represented by two landmarks located on its
vertical supports. The planar geometry that has been built around the door consists of bundles of hyperbolae, ellipses, and
orthogonal circles. We prove that this geometry can be directly measured in the camera image plane and that the proposed
vision-based control strategy can also be related to human. Realistic simulation and experiments are reported to show the
effectiveness of our solutions.
Video: https://cloud.laas.fr/index.php/s/Uu58q6dD6hYBKvX
Publications
Journals
- How do walkers avoid a mobile robot crossing their way?. Christian Vassallo, Anne-Hélène Olivier, Philippe Souères, Armel Crétual, Olivier Stasse and Julien Pettré. Gait & Posture , 51:97 - 103, 2017.
- Adaptive synthesis of dynamically feasible full-body movements for the Humanoid Robot HRP-2 by flexible combination of learned dynamic movement primitives. A. Mukovskiy, C. Vassallo, M. Naveau, O. Stasse, P. Souères and MA. Giese. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 91:pp.270-283, 2016. (Corrected version under review).
- The Geometry of Confocal Curves for Passing Through a Door. P. Salaris, C. Vassallo, P. Souères and J.-P. Laumond. Robotics, IEEE Transactions on, 31(5):1180-1193, 2015.
International Conferences
- Image-based control relying on conic curves foliation for passing through a gate. Paolo Salaris, Christian Vassallo, Philippe Sou{ères and Jean-Paul Laumond. In {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2015)}, Seattle, United States, May 2015.
- Airbus/future of aircraft factory HRP-2 as universal worker proof of concept. Olivier Stasse, Andreas Orthey, Francesco Morsillo, Mathieu Geisert, Nicolas Mansard, Maximilien Naveau and Christian Vassallo. In {International Conference on Humanoid Robotics}, Madrid, Spain, November 2014.
Books and Book Chapters
- Arms motion of a humanoid inspired by human motion. M Tomic, C. Vassallo, C. Chevallereau, A. Rodic and V. Potkonjak, in New Trends in Medical and Service Robots. Springer International Publishing, 2016.
Workshop
- Learning Movement Primitives for the Humanoid Robot HRP-2. A Mukovskiy, C. Vassallo, M. Naveau, O. Stasse, P. Souères and Giese MA.. In IEEE IROS 2015 Workshop on "Towards truly human-like bipedal locomotion: the role of optimization, learning and motor primitives" , 2015.