Olivier Roussel

Email: olivier.roussel ( at ) laas.fr
Address: LAAS-CNRS
7, avenue du Colonel Roche
31077 Toulouse Cedex 4
Assistant: 05 61 33 64 69
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Short Bio


I obtained my M.S. degree in Robotics from University of Toulouse III in 2010. Then I worked as a Research Engineer at CEA-List from April 2010 to June 2012 on humanoid path planning (combinatorial planning using convex cells partitionning) and crowd simulation.
Between September 2012 and October 2015, I was a Ph.D. Student at LAAS-CNRS and University of Toulouse III under the supervision of Dr. Michel Taïx as part of the ANR Flecto project in collaboration with CEA-List and KineoCAM. From August to November 2014, I was a visiting scholar at the Bretl Research Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I defended my Ph.D. October 5th, 2015. You can watch the video of the defense (in French), read the manuscript (in French) or obtain more details at this page.

Research Areas and Interests


My researches focus on various aspects of robotics, such as motion planning, optimization, multi-body dynamics, elasticity, optimal control, differential geometry and mathematical modelling. I am also still very interested in my previous research work, i.e. computer graphics, collision detection and crowd simulation.

Inverse geometry of quasi-static elastic rods

Considering an elastic rod handled by grippers at its both extremities, it is well known that for a given grippers placement, there exists a finite number of static equilibrium configurations satisfying these boundary conditions. Using a new closed-form expression of elastic rods internal wrenches, we propose an approach to solve the inverse geometry problem, i.e. finding one configuration of the rod that satisfies a given grippers placement. More precisely, in the planar case, analytic forms of rod shape and sensitivity can be obtained from elliptic functions and integrals. These can be coupled with some numerical optimization methods to solve efficiently the inverse geometry problem in the planar case.

Resolution of the inverse geometry problem for planar elastic rods at equilibrium configurations

Motion planning for elastic rods

The goal of this research topic is to extend the well-known motion planning formulation to elastic rods. One of the main challenge is to deal with a physically realistic deformable model and to overcome the curse of dimensionality in the resulting configuration space.


Kinodynamic planning and sampling static equilibrium configurations


Convergence of dynamic simulation and the static equilibrium model with two different control schemes

Experiments in simulation

Toy scenario

Disassembly study

Click on the picture to get the corresponding video. You will need the Xvid codec.

Motion planning and dimensionality reduction

Software


quasi-static elastic rod library

https://github.com/olivier-roussel/qserl

C++ implementation of the parameterization of static equilibrium configurations of elastic rods., including planar and 3-dimensional rods.

Previous Research Work