About us

The Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes (LAAS) is a CNRS research unit associated with four of the six founding members of the University of Toulouse.

LAAS’ research activities fall within the domain of Information Sciences and Technologies and address complex systems (artificial and sometimes natural) generally heterogeneous, and at different scales, to devise theories, methodologies and tools for modeling, designing and controlling them.

Research, innovation and transfer are tied. The lab has a history of strong relationships with industry and works in a large number of collaborative projects with international, national and regional industries of all size.

What motivates us

The goal of this project is to design new algorithms for  motion planning and control of  redundant robots in cluttered environments, based on a combination of exploration and numerical optimal control methods. These new methods will be tested  on  the  humanoid  robot  HRP2  of  LAAS and on an new industrial robot bought by University of Heidelberg in the context of this project. The main novelty of this combination of random exploration of the configuration space and numerical optimal control is that it will enable us:

1.       to tackle the problem of local minima encountered by numerical optimization alone and
2.       to obtain dynamically balanced trajectories for a complex environment described by many constraints.Let us notice that although the output of path planning is a  quasi-statically stable path, the result of optimal control will be a motion taking into account dynamics.