The requirement for self-health monitoring, preventive medicine and rehabilitation is increasing regarding improved health care. Wearable medical devices are becoming more popular as the healthcare industry and consumers find early disease warnings as well as monitoring the improvement of therapies in various disorders. This technology reduces costly hospital stays mostly due to rehabilitation process. The miniaturization of sensors and developing new sensor technologies has played a vital role in the development of wearable systems. Wearable devices rely mostly on inertial sensors for movement tracking. The movement sensors are small, inexpensive and require low power, making them increasingly accessible and desirable. Wearable devices are an effective way to manage, monitor, and provide feedback of patient health to get adequate aid. We present wearable device The Teach'Wear. The Teach'Wear must answer a chronic problem: back pain, MSDs, Musculoskeletal Disorders, affect the entire population, without any physiological or generational barriers. Our connected clothing technology is therefore intended to be a help in maintaining “good postures”, but also an exploitable data collection that can be used to raise awareness, and assistance to expertise in order to adapt an effective prevention protocol in time at the workstation.

Mixed reality (MR) is a hybrid reality where real and virtual objects are merged to produce an enriched interactive environment. Virtual Reality (VR) has been used in the simulation of production processes such as the product assembly and the execution of industrial tasks. Augmented reality (AR) has been widely used as an instructional tool to help the user to perform the task in real world conditions. Most of these works were focused on solving technical problems, specific to the type of application but they did not take advantage of the achievements realized in both VR and AR technologies. This paper presents a mixed reality system that integrates virtual assembly environment with augmented reality. This approach is mainly based on the development of a hybrid tacking system for the synchronization of the virtual and the real hand of the user. The evaluation of this Mixed Reality approach showed a statistically significant improvement of the user performance in the assembly task execution, compared to the task realized in virtual environment.

This article presents the mechatronic design of the autonomous humanoid robot called NAO that is built by the French company Aldebaran-Robotics. With its height of 0.57 m and its weight about 4.5 kg, this innovative robot is lightweight and compact. It distinguishes itself from existing humanoids thanks to its pelvis kinematics design, its proprietary actuation system based on brush DC motors, its electronic, computer and distributed software architectures. This robot has been designed to be affordable without sacrificing quality and performance. It is an open and easy-to-handle platform. The comprehensive and functional design is one of the reasons that helped select NAO to replace the AIBO quadrupeds in the 2008 RoboCup standard league.

In this paper, a real time tracking system by vision is presented. Thanks to it, the interaction between the human and the robot is simplified for example, in the case of the remote control of mobile robot. The operator selects the target to the proposed vision system, pointing out its border. Then, with the visual feedback, he can simply follow the behavior of the algorithm : correct target border, and sufficient value of the confidence index. In case of problems, the operator is warned by the system, and can react with appropriate action.

Pivoting manipulation can be an alternative to pushing operation when the floor is not flat enough, or when the object to manipulate is too heavy. The technique of pivoting is used by humans to move large and bulky furniture from one place to another. The decomposition of the task of pivoting has already been studied, in particular with the use of two fingers of a robotic arm. This work intends to apply the technique of pivoting using an humanoid platform. The robot should be able to pivot the object and to walk with it to displace it to a specific remote location. The research achievements proposed here take place in a more long term objective aimed at improving the dexterity and the autonomy of humanoid robots. As a matter of fact, such robots should be able to handle objects and move around in the environment in an autonomous way. This paper describes the algorithm designed to perform the displacement of a large object using the pivoting technique. It also presents the results of the dynamic simulation and the results of the real hardware experiment of the HRP-2 platform performing the task.

To operate in a known and dynamic environment, a robot needs two different kinds of a priori knowledge : behavioral and visual. In this paper we propose a general methodology to introduce this a priori knowledge, and we illustrate it by an application : the software developments for the AIBO robots to play soccer. The more difficult task is to extract reliable visual information. It is the reason why a priori knowledge is already introduced at the level of vision processing. Without reliable vision information it is impossible for the robot to switch to the tight behavior, and consequently to play.

This work deals with the design of a locomotion algorithm that changes the speed of a crawling quadruped by varying the duty factor /spl beta/. The walking pattern used is the well-known wave gait. This kind of gait should be maintained as much as possible since it is the most efficient locomotion pattern on flat ground. However, the transition between initial and final gaits cannot be based on a wave gait any more because support legs have to be resynchronized according to a new duty factor. This paper proposes an algorithm that deals with the gait transition between initial and final duty factors.

This paper deals with the description of the strategy adopted by the French team in the Sony legged league to play soccer. Not only the behaviors designed for RoboCup are presented, but also the arrangement of the three different modules inside the robot, namely the vision, locomotion and strategy modules. The vision module runs at lower priority and provides others with relevant information captured from the environment. The locomotion module is responsible for the walking gaits generation. It manages transitions between forward, turning and rotation modes. It incorporates changes in speed, and recovery procedures in case the robot falls down. The paper focuses on how the decision or other behaviors are being taken. The overall architecture and the communications between the three modules are also described.

Deals with the implementation of an efficient walking pattern for quadruped robots. The main objective is to give the robot the ability to walk in every direction as quickly as possible. Not only forward motion, but also backward motion, turning gaits of variable curvature including rotation around the body platform center of gravity (COG) are considered separately. For this purpose the well known crawl gait with duty factor of 3/4 represents the starting point of the experimental study. From this point the regular symmetric gait is improved thanks to sideways motion, turning gaits are adapted from the forward crawl gait and a special rotation motion is designed. All transitions between forward, backward, left and right turning and rotation motions are detailed. Experiments have been carried out using the Sony quadruped "pet robot" prototype which look part in the Paris Robocup-98 legged robot exhibition.

The hyper-redundancy concept and related mechanisms are of special interest in robotics research. Trajectory planning and obstacle avoidance seem to be the main research areas where the use of hyper-redundancy is considered. However, there are few prototypes of this kind of robots. The present work is the introductory part of a larger study aiming at the construction of a hyper-redundant, snake-like robot supposed to progress as a real snake, without limbs or wheels. It represents a first approach to a simulation of a snake-like mechanism in order to get basic characteristics of a such locomotion.

This paper focuses on the description and the performance analysis of a new type of force feedback handle with special features. This handle has the shape of a cylindrical stick whose upper part can move with respect to the lower part. The operator seizes both parts of this handle with his hand and can move around in the surrounding space, feeling reaction forces from the upper part. This manipulator has been integrated within a global control station. The experimental layout is provided with virtual environment generation which manages the interaction of the handle with the real world. The experiments we conducted have shown interesting results.

This paper focuses on a new traction control concept for autonomous land-vehicles. This system avoids wheel slip greater than the critical wheel slip S/sub cr/ during acceleration and deceleration. We present an original approach to detecting an excess over S/sub cr/, without knowledge of its actual value, which depends on tire/ground combinations. This approach allows the control system to adapt itself to every kind of terrain. In order to illustrate a potential application of this concept, we present the design of an autonomous all-terrain vehicle, for which this control strategy has been developed. Sensor instrumentation, crucial for system stability, is also discussed.