TOPIC 1: Legged and non-legged Locomotion in LRP, France

PRESENTER: Pierre Blazevic, Professor

AFFILIATION: Versailles University

DATE: Thursday, 25th October 2001

TIME:12:00 - 1.00pm

PLACE: CSE K17 1st Floor Seminar Room

ABSTRACT 1: In this talk I will present some of the research activities of LRP. In our research group we are interested in articulated locomotion systems. This topic includes, multi-legged (4/6 legs) and apod locomotion. I will present a new structure of an articulated hexapod body whose redundancy give the opportunity of designing new periodic gaits that could be optimized according to stability or energy criteria. Also will be presented some work about snake like locomotion using biologically inspired gaits. A 2D model and some simulations will be presented. More detailed results about four-legged locomotion will be given during Vincent Hugel's presentation.

BIOGRAPHY OF SPEAKER 1: Pierre Blazevic was born in 1962, graduated from ENS de CACHAN, France, received his Aggregation of Applied Physics in 1985, Master degree in robotics in 1986 and PhD from Paris VI University in 1991. Assistant Professor since 1992 in Versailles University. He joined the LRP since its creation in 1987. His current research interests are wheeled and legged locomotion, and force feedback devices for teleoperation.

TOPIC 2: Quadruped Legged Locomotion Developments from 1999 to 2001

PRESENTER: Vincent Hugel, Assistant Professor

ABSTRACT 2: In this presentation, the French approach of quadruped legged locomotion will be detailed. When designing walking patterns it is important to look at the parameters that have a strong influence on locomotion, and what kind of influence they have on the motion balance of the robot. Special tuning of crawl gait parameters will be described. To deal with locomotion balance sideways motion was also introduced. The crawl gait features a duty factor of 0.75. To increase speed duty factor can be reduced down to 0.5 to reach a trot gait. Current research developments are under way to design an omnidirectional standing trot, that can be used for RoboCup and indoor exploration purposes.

BIOGRAPHY OF SPEAKER 2: Vincent Hugel graduated from the "Ecole des Mines de Nancy", one of the French leading engineering schools in 1994. He received his specialization degree in Robotics at INSTN (CEA, FRANCE) in 1995.He has been involved in the design and implementation of walking algorithms on hexapods and quadrupeds. This work is part of the developments of his PhD thesis, which he received in November 1999. Assistant Professor since 2000 in Versailles University. His current research interests are legged locomotion,and embedded control software for Robotics systems.

Seminar Convenor:

Bernhard Hengst
Tel: +61-2-9385-3988,
E-mail: bernhardh@cse.unsw.edu.au
School of Computer Science & Engineering, UNSW.