We have obtained an INRIA grant for a collaborative work with Cassino University, Monastir engineer school and University of Oran for a preliminary work on the development of a wire-driven parallel robot for rehabilitation. Such robot will allow for an objective monitoring of the patient progress (i.e. measuring the range of motion of the injured member during the therapy) and to be able to exert safely a force-controlled rehabilitation protocol with the advantages of being a low-cost platform that is furthermore minimally intrusive for the patient. We have already established what should be the motion measurement ranges for various types of injuries (lower and upper members) together with the amplitude of the desired forces that should be exerted.
The aim of this project was to study the calibration of a deployable mechanism used by a satellite for the positioning of an Earth Observation Telescope. The project was extended for a second year.
This project, that is funded by the CNRS is a follow-up of the "MAX" project that has been completed on September 2003. The objectives is to improve the accuracy of complex mechanical systems. The partners are: LIRMM (Montpelier), LASMEA, IFMA (Clermont-Ferrand), IRCCYN (Nantes)
Our contribution is the use of interval analysis based methods for performances analysis and for systems solving that arise when dealing with the design, control and calibration of such systems.
This project, that has been funded by the CNRS and has been completed on September 2003, has as objective to design tools for the design of complex mechanical systems. The partners are: LIRMM (Montpelier), LASMEA, IFMA (Clermont-Ferrand), IRCCYN (Nantes).
Our contribution is the use of interval analysis based methods for the determination of robot performances and for systems solving that arise when dealing with the design, control and calibration of such systems. A follow-up of this project (ROBEA MP2) will be funded by CNRS.
Using floating point numbers to represent real numbers is the reason for an important amount of failures and potential faults in software for critical systems. The modeling of such systems, combined with model checking techniques, proof and test case generation techniques, enhances the quality of the development process and improves the reliability of systems which integrate pieces of software. Unfortunately, the currently available approaches, notations and techniques do not really take into account floating point numbers, although the usual way to do computation over real numbers with a computer is to use floating point numbers. The main difficulty with getting a correct account of floating point numbers comes from:
The aim of the V3F ACI project is to provide tools required to evaluate the representation of real numbers by means of floating point numbers during the software validation and checking phases. More precisely, our aim is to develop a framework relying on CSP approaches for the validation of program computations with hypothesis coming from the modeling phase. Constraint methods have been successfully used in many applications related to software validation and checking. They have already shown their capabilities in automatic test case generation, in model checking as well as in code analysis. However, these CSP techniques are still restricted to handle integer, rational and real numbers, and the challenge is thus to be able to solve techniques allowing to handle floating point numbers. We are developing solving techniques adapted to floating point numbers in order to validate and check critical software. We are also studying the use of such a solver in the processes of model checking, and the use of automatic test case generation and static code checking.