Skip to: site menu | section menu | main content
I defended my thesis "Functional rehabilitation of posture and walking: Coordination of healthy and deficient limbs" on Friday, October 26th, 2007. This took place at Centre des Technologies Logicielles (CTL) at 2 pm.
I'd like to thank each member of the committe, and especially my two reviewersR: Tadej BajdR, Jean-Marc Chassery, Auke IjspeertR, Jocelyne Troccaz, Bernard Espiau, Dominique David, and Christine Azevedo.
When controlling postural movements through artificial prosthetic limbs or Functional Electrical Stimulation, an important issue is the enhancement of the interaction of the patient with the artificial system through his valid limb motions. We address the problem of the coexistence of voluntary controlled with artificially controlled movements. We propose to observe the valid limbs through movement sensors in order to optimize the interaction at two levels: a strategic level, where we aim at identifying as soon as possible the postural task the patient intends to execute, and a tactic level, where we aim at monitoring the ongoing task in order to estimate some movement parameters. Particularly, to ensure legs coordination during walking, the CPG (Central Pattern Generator) concept is introduced, and we propose a robust phase estimation method based on the observer of a non-linear oscillator. This framework mixes discrete and continuous behaviors; this duality raises some integration issues and implies to setup a hybrid command architecture. Two additional constraints are the required number of sensors, as well as the complexity of the algorithms, that both have to be kept as low as possible. The proposed solutions are based on movement models, and have been validated through real time experiments.