Publications by Nicolas Sommer

Shared human–robot proportional control of a dexterous myoelectric prosthesis

Aude Billard, Edoardo D'Anna, Nicolas Sommer, Silvestro Micera, Emanuele Formento, Saurav Aryan, Vincent Alexandre Mendez, Francesco Maria Petrini, Fiorenzo Artoni, Katie Zhi Zhuang

Myoelectric prostheses allow users to recover lost functionality by controlling a robotic device with their remaining muscle activity. Such commercial devices can give users a high level of autonomy, but still do not approach the dexterity of the intact hu ...

2019

Learning Externally Modulated Dynamical Systems

Aude Billard, Nicolas Sommer, Klas Jonas Alfred Kronander

Dynamical Systems (DS) are often used to represent motion, with the advantage of being easy to learn from demonstrations. We present a method to modulate DS depending on an external signal, extending our previous work on Locally Modulated DS (LMDS, Kronand ...

2017

Multi-contact tactile exploration and interaction with unknown objects

Nicolas Sommer

Humans rely on the sense of touch in almost every aspect of daily life, whether to tie shoelaces, place fingertips on a computer keyboard or find keys inside a bag. With robots moving into human-centered environment, tactile exploration becomes more and mo ...

EPFL2017

Multi-contact haptic exploration and grasping with tactile sensors

Aude Billard, Nicolas Sommer

Haptic exploration has received a great deal of attention of late thanks to the variety of commercially available tactile sensors. While the majority of previous works consider control of a single contact point at a time, we tackle simultaneous control of ...

Elsevier2016

Bimanual Compliant Tactile Exploration for Grasping Unknown Objects

Aude Billard, Nicolas Sommer, Miao Li

Humans have an incredible capacity to learn properties of objects by pure tactile exploration with their two hands. With robots moving into human-centred environment, tactile exploration becomes more and more important as vision may be occluded easily by o ...

2014

Stretchable capacitive tactile skin on humanoid robot fingers - first experiments and results

Aude Billard, Nicolas Sommer, Stéphanie Lacour, Aaron Powers Gerratt

A stretchable tactile sensor skin has been demonstrated on the dorsal side of a robotic hand for the first time. The sensors can detect normal pressures on the same scale as human skin but also in excess of 250 kPa and withstand strains in excess of 15%. U ...

2014

Face classification using touch with a humanoid robot hand

Aude Billard, Nicolas Sommer

This paper presents an experiment in which the iCub humanoid robot learns to recognize faces through proprioceptive information. We take inspiration in the way blind people recognize people's faces, i.e. through tactile exploration of the person's face. Th ...

2012