François Michaud

• Université de Sherbrooke

Résumé Cette note de recherche vise à présenter comment la science-fiction fut utilisée dans un projet de recherche pour coconstruire une vision commune de la robotique sociale favorisant la participation sociale des personnes aînées. Une recherche-action a été réalisée à l’aide de deux forums d’informateurs-clés regroupant des personnes aînées ani...

In appearance-based localization and mapping, loop closure detection is the process used to determinate if the current observation comes from a previously visited location or a new one. As the size of the internal map increases, so does the time required to compare new observations with all stored locations, eventually limiting online processing. T...

For large-scale and long-term simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), a robot has to deal with unknown initial positioning caused by either the kidnapped robot problem or multi-session mapping. This paper addresses these problems by tying the SLAM system with a global loop closure detection approach, which intrinsically handles these situatio...

Loop closure detection is the process involved when trying to find a match between the current and a previously visited locations in SLAM. Over time, the amount of time required to process new observations increases with the size of the internal map, which may influence real-time processing. In this paper, we present a novel real-time loop closure...

Introduction: Visiting a patient's living environment is important for occupational therapists, albeit costly and time consuming. MapIt is a mobile app producing a 3D representation of a home with the possibility of taking measurements. The purpose of this study was to explore the utility of a 3D representation of a patient's home for the clinical...

For long-term simultaneous planning, localization and mapping (SPLAM), a robot should be able to continuously update its map according to the dynamic changes of the environment and the new areas explored. With limited onboard computation capabilities, a robot should also be able to limit the size of the map used for online localization and mapping....

Background: Persons living with dementia and their care partners place a high value on aging in place and maintaining independence. Socially assistive robots - embodied characters or pets that provide companionship and aid through social interaction - are a promising tool to support these goals. There is a growing commercial market for these devic...

Énoncé des implications de la recherche Durant la pandémie, l’application MapIt a été intégrée dans un programme d’ergothérapie pour soutenir l’apprentissage à distance de l’adaptation de l’environnement bâti. MapIt permet de cartographier des pièces d’un domicile, puis d’en générer un modèle en 3D pour la visualisation et la prise de mesures virtu...

Background: Exergames are increasingly being used among survivors of stroke with chronic upper extremity (UE) sequelae to continue exercising at home after discharge and maintain activity levels. The use of virtual reality exergames combined with a telerehabilitation app (VirTele) may be an interesting alternative to rehabilitate the UE sequelae in...

Introduction: Socially assistive robots are devices designed to aid users through social interaction and companionship. Social robotics promise to support cognitive health and aging in place for older adults with and without dementia, as well as their care partners. However, while new and more advanced social robots are entering the commercial mar...

For robots navigating using only a camera, illumination changes in indoor environments can cause re-localization failures during autonomous navigation. In this paper, we present a multi-session visual SLAM approach to create a map made of multiple variations of the same locations in different illumination conditions. The multi-session map can then...

Artificial audition aims at providing hearing capabilities to machines, computers and robots. Existing frameworks in robot audition offer interesting sound source localization, tracking and separation performance, although involve a significant amount of computations that limit their use on robots with embedded computing capabilities. This paper pr...

This paper introduces the Fast Cross-Correlation (FCC) method for Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) Estimation for pairs of microphones on a small aperture microphone array. FCC relies on low-rank decomposition and exploits symmetry in even and odd bases to speed up computation while preserving TDoA accuracy. FCC reduces the number of flops by a fa...

This paper introduces SMP-PHAT, which performs direction of arrival (DoA) of sound estimation with a microphone array by merging pairs of microphones that are parallel in space. This approach reduces the number of pairwise cross-correlation computations, and brings down the number of flops and memory lookups when searching for DoA. Experiments on l...

Most biological sensors preferentially encode changes in a stimulus rather than the steady components. However, intrinsically phasic artificial mechanoreceptors have not yet been described. We constructed a phasic mechanoreceptor by encapsulating carbon nanotube film in a viscoelastic matrix supported by a rigid substrate. When stimulated by a sphe...

Introduction: Access to public rehabilitation services for patients with non-urgent conditions - which suffer mainly from musculoskeletal disorders - is problematic around the world. Remote rehabilitation services are recognized as effective means to increase accessibility. Patient acceptability is an important element in the successful implementa...

As telecommunications technology progresses, telehealth frameworks are becoming more widely adopted in the context of long-term care (LTC) for older adults, both in care facilities and in homes. Today, robots could assist healthcare workers when they provide care to elderly patients, who constitute a particularly vulnerable population during the CO...

BACKGROUND Exergames are increasingly used among stroke survivors with chronic UE sequelae, to continue exercising at home, after discharge, and maintain activity level. The use of virtual reality exergames combined with telerehabilitation app (VirTele) may be an interesting alternative to rehabilitate the UE sequelae in chronic stroke survivors wh...

Background: Exergames are increasingly being used among survivors of stroke with chronic upper extremity (UE) sequelae to continue exercising at home after discharge and maintain activity levels. The use of virtual reality exergames combined with a telerehabilitation app (VirTele) may be an interesting alternative to rehabilitate the UE sequelae i...

BACKGROUND Strong evidence supports beginning stroke rehabilitation as soon as the patient’s medical status has stabilized and continuing following discharge from acute care. However, adherence to rehabilitation treatments over the rehabilitation phase has been shown to be suboptimal. OBJECTIVE Objective: The aim of this study is to assess the imp...

Background Strong evidence supports beginning stroke rehabilitation as soon as the patient’s medical status has stabilized and continuing following discharge from acute care. However, adherence to rehabilitation treatments over the rehabilitation phase has been shown to be suboptimal. Objective The aim of this study is to assess the impact of a te...

BACKGROUND In Canada, chronic stroke survivors have difficulty accessing community-based rehabilitation services, due to lack of resources. VirTele, a personalized remote rehabilitation program combining virtual reality exergames and telerehabilitation, was developed to offer chronic stroke survivors the opportunity to pursue rehabilitation of thei...

Background In Canada, stroke survivors have difficulty accessing community-based rehabilitation services because of a lack of resources. VirTele, a personalized remote rehabilitation program combining virtual reality exergames and telerehabilitation, was developed to provide stroke survivors an opportunity to pursue rehabilitation of their chronic...

Background In Canada, only 11% of stroke survivors have access to outpatient and community-based rehabilitation after discharge from inpatient rehabilitation. Hence, innovative community-based strategies are needed to provide adequate postrehabilitation services. The VirTele program, which combines virtual reality exergames and a telerehabilitation...

An interesting class of planning domains, including planning for daily activities of Mars rovers, involves achievement of goals with time constraints and concurrent actions with probabilistic durations. Current probabilistic approaches, which rely on a discrete time model, introduce a blow up in the search state-space when the two factors of action...

In health care, a telepresence robot could be used to have a clinician or a caregiver assist seniors in their homes, without having to travel to these locations. However, the usability of these platforms for such applications requires that they can navigate and interact with a certain level of autonomy. For instance, robots should be able to go to...

As telecommunications technology progresses, telehealth frameworks are becoming more widely adopted in the context of long-term care (LTC) for older adults, both in care facilities and in homes. Today, robots could assist healthcare workers when they provide care to elderly patients, who constitute a particularly vulnerable population during the CO...

For robots navigating using only a camera, illumination changes in indoor environments can cause localization failures during autonomous navigation. In this paper, we present a multi-session visual SLAM approach to create a map made of multiple variations of the same locations in different illumination conditions. The multi-session map can then be...

Artificial audition aims at providing hearing capabilities to machines, computers and robots. Existing frameworks in robot audition offer interesting sound source localization, tracking and separation performance, but involve a significant amount of computations that limit their use on robots with embedded computing capabilities. This paper present...

BACKGROUND In Canada, only 11% of survivors access to outpatient and community-based rehabilitation, after discharge. Hence, innovative community-based strategies are needed in order to provide adequate post-rehabilitation services. The VirTele-program (a program that combines VIRtual-reality exergames and TELErehabilitation), was developed to give...

Inertial measurement units (IMUs) have been increasingly popular in rehabilitation research. However, despite their accessibility and potential advantages, their uptake and acceptance by health professionals remain a big challenge. The development of an IMU-based clinical tool must bring together engineers, researchers and clinicians. This study is...

This paper introduces BIRD, the Big Impulse Response Dataset. This open dataset consists of 100,000 multichannel room impulse responses (RIRs) generated from simulations using the Image Method, making it the largest multichannel open dataset currently available. These RIRs can be used toperform efficient online data augmentation for scenarios that...

Background Home adaptation processes enhancing occupational engagement rely on identifying environmental barriers, generally during time-consuming home visits performed by occupational therapists (OTs). Relevance of a 3D model to the OT’s work has been attested, but a convenient and consumer-available technology to map the home environment in 3D is...

BACKGROUND Home adaptation processes enhancing occupational engagement rely on identifying environmental barriers, generally during time-consuming home visits performed by occupational therapists (OTs). Relevance of a 3D model to the OT’s work has been attested, but a convenient and consumer-available technology to map the home environment in 3D is...

In dynamic environments, performance of visual SLAM techniques can be impaired by visual features taken from moving objects. One solution is to identify those objects so that their visual features can be removed for localization and mapping. This paper presents a simple and fast pipeline that uses deep neural networks, extended Kalman filters and v...

A microphone array can provide a mobile robot with the capability of localizing, tracking and separating distant sound sources in 2D, i.e., estimating their relative elevation and azimuth. To combine acoustic data with visual information in real world settings, spatial correlation must be established. The approach explored in this paper consists of...

Portacolone et al.’s Ethics Review highlights the ethical challenges associated with the implementation of telepresence devices and applications in the context of aging and dementia. In this response, we review ethical considerations as they relate to specific modalities of telepresence, with an emphasis on the continuum of potential interaction ag...

Background: Exergames have the potential to provide an accessible, remote approach for poststroke upper extremity (UE) rehabilitation. However, the use of exergames without any follow-up by a health professional could lead to compensatory movements during the exercises, inadequate choice of difficulty level, exercises not being completed, and lack...

Distant speech processing is a challenging task, especially when dealing with the cocktail party effect. Sound source separation is thus often required as a preprocessing step prior to speech recognition to improve the signal to distortion ratio (SDR). Recently, a combination of beamforming and speech separation networks have been proposed to impro...

Speech-based biometrics is one of the most effective ways for identity management and one of the preferred methods by users and companies given its flexibility, speed and reduced cost. Current state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems are known to be strongly dependent on the condition of the speech material provided as input and can be affected...

BACKGROUND Exergames have the potential to provide an accessible, remote approach for poststroke upper extremity (UE) rehabilitation. However, the use of exergames without any follow-up by a health professional could lead to compensatory movements during the exercises, inadequate choice of difficulty level, exercises not being completed, and lack o...

Smart wheelchairs are powered wheelchairs equipped with technologies that can collect information on powered wheelchair use, the driver, and interaction with the environment, and can use this information to modify wheelchair and/or driver behavior. These technologies could potentially be used to create tools to optimize design of training sessions,...

Human-robot interaction in natural settings requires filtering out the different sources of sounds from the environment. Such ability usually involves the use of microphone arrays to localize, track and separate sound sources online. Multi-microphone signal processing techniques can improve robustness to noise but the processing cost increases with...

Distributed as an open‐source library since 2013, real‐time appearance‐based mapping (RTAB‐Map) started as an appearance‐based loop closure detection approach with memory management to deal with large‐scale and long‐term online operation. It then grew to implement simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) on various robots and mobile platforms....

BACKGROUND Lower limb exoskeletons have been developed to enable individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) to walk. Currently, they can be used by people with no motor function (SCI ASIA A or B). OBJECTIVES To present the perspectives of individuals with ASIA C or D incomplete SCI concerning the usability of lower limb exoskeletons to R&D engineer...

For long-term simultaneous planning, localization and mapping (SPLAM), a robot should be able to continuously update its map according to the dynamic changes of the environment and the new areas explored. With limited onboard computation capabilities, a robot should also be able to limit the size of the map used for online localization and mapping....

In order to move safely and accurately, mobile platforms using steerable wheels require adequate coordination of their actuators. One possibility to achieve actuator coordination is to control the motion of the chassis’ instantaneous centre of rotation (ICR) and motion around it. Considering the chassis as a rigid body, the ICR is located at the in...

Vision and audition are widely used in human-computer social interaction. Even though highly performant tactile sensors are available on the market, very few social interfaces exploit haptics as a sensing modality. Touch is a fundamental channel to communicate complex social feeling. Recent haptic studies show up changes of paradigm in the design o...

Smart wheelchairs are powered wheelchairs equipped with technologies that can collect information on powered wheelchair use, the driver, and interaction with the environment, and can use this information to modify wheelchair and/or driver behavior. These technologies could potentially be used to create tools to optimize design of training sessions,...

Human–robot interaction in natural settings requires filtering out the different sources of sounds from the environment. Such ability usually involves the use of microphone arrays to localize, track and separate sound sources online. Multi-microphone signal processing techniques can improve robustness to noise but the processing cost increases with...

The ultimate long-term goal in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is to design robots that can act as a natural extension to humans. This requires the design of robot control architectures to provide structure for the integration of the necessary components into HRI. This paper describes how HBBA, a Hybrid Behavior-Based Architecture, can be used as a u...

Using mobile systems (e.g., smart phones, tablets, mobile robots), human metrology (HM) is a soft biometric that can be beneficial for human detection and identification from a 2D image, as long as it can be done online and in open conditions. This paper presents an approach that derives HM measurements from 2D images of silhouettes. The approach e...

To date, self-driving experimental wheelchair technologies have been either inexpensive or robust, but not both. Yet, in order to achieve real-world acceptance, both qualities are fundamentally essential. We present a unique approach to achieve inexpensive and robust autonomous and semi-autonomous assistive navigation for existing fielded wheelchai...

A telepresence mobile robot is a remote-controlled, wheeled device with wireless internet connectivity for bidirectional audio, video and data transmission. In health care, a telepresence robot could be used to have a clinician or a caregiver assist seniors in their homes without having to travel to these locations. Many mobile telepresence robotic...

To date, self-driving experimental wheelchair technologies have been either inexpensive or robust, but not both. Yet, in order to achieve real-world acceptance, both qualities are fundamentally essential. We present a unique approach to achieve inexpensive and robust autonomous and semi-autonomous assistive navigation for existing fielded wheelchai...

Enhancing a beam+ Telepresence Robot for Remote Home Care Applications - Best poster award

Tendon-Driven Manipulators (TDMs) are capable of large workspaces and low link inertias in compact embodiments. However, as most TDMs are powered by electromechanical actuators, their performance is fundamentally limited by either the high output inertia of electric geared motors, or by the large volume and weight of direct-drive electric motors. T...

Audition is a rich source of spatial, identity, linguistic and paralinguistic information. Processing all this information requires acquisition, processing and interpretation of sound sources, which are instantaneous, invisible and noisy signals. This can lead to different responses by the system in relation to the information perceived. This paper...

Stroke is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. Consequently, many stroke survivors exhibit difficulties undergoing voluntary movement in their affected upper limb, compromising their functional performance and level of independence. To minimize the negative impact of stroke disabilities, exercises are recognized as a key element in po...

Over the last few years, the number of remote patient monitoring (RPM) products and of videoconferencing systems has exploded. There is also a significant number of research initiatives addressing the use of service robots for assistance in daily living activities. From a technological standpoint, providing telehomecare services is certainly feasib...

Autonomous robots cohabiting with humans will have to achieve recurring tasks while adapting to the changing conditions of the world. A spatio-temporal memory categorizes the experiences of a robot to improve its ability to adapt to its environment. In this paper, we present a spatio-temporal (ST) memory model consisting of a cascade of two adaptiv...

Drone Detection and Localization with Sound Using Multiple Microphone Arrays

Sound source localization is an important challenge for mobile robots operating in real life settings. Sound sources of interest, such as speech, are often corrupted by broadband coherent noise sound source(s) that are non-stationary during transitions between steady-state segments. The interfering noise introduces localization ambiguities leading...

To be used on a mobile robot, speech/non-speech discrimination must be robust to environmental noise and to the position of the interlocutor, without necessarily having to satisfy low-latency requirements. To address these conditions, this paper presents a speech/non-speech discrimination approach based on pitch estimation. Pitch features are robus...

Microphone array post-filters have demonstrated their ability to greatly reduce noise at the output of a beamformer. However, current techniques only consider a single source of interest, most of the time assuming stationary background noise. We propose a microphone array post-filter that enhances the signals produced by the separation of simultane...

We propose a system that gives a mobile robot the ability to separate simultaneous sound sources. A microphone array is used along with a real-time dedicated implementation of Geometric Source Separation and a post-filter that gives us a further reduction of interferences from other sources. We present results and comparisons for separation of mult...

Mobile robots in real-life settings would benefit from being able to localize sound sources. Such a capability can nicely complement vision to help localize a person or an interesting event in the environment, and also to provide enhanced processing for other capabilities such as speech recognition. In this paper we present a robust sound source lo...

In this paper we present a new robust sound source localization and tracking method using an array of eight microphones (US patent pending) . The method uses a steered beamformer based on the reliability-weighted phase transform (RWPHAT) along with a particle filter-based tracking algorithm. The proposed system is able to estimate both the directio...

The hearing sense on a mobile robot is important because it is omnidirectional and it does not require direct line-of-sight with the sound source. Such capabilities can nicely complement vision to help localize a person or an interesting event in the environment. To do so the robot auditory system must be able to work in noisy, unknown and diverse...

Mobile robots in real-life settings would benefit from being able to localize and track sound sources. Such a capability can help localizing a person or an interesting event in the environment, and also provides enhanced processing for other capabilities such as speech recognition. To give this capability to a robot, the challenge is not only to lo...

This paper describes a system that gives a mobile robot the ability to perform automatic speech recognition with simultaneous speakers. A microphone array is used along with a real-time implementation of Geometric Source Separation and a post-filter that gives a further reduction of interference from other sources. The post-filter is also used to e...

Nature is filled with examples of autonomous creatures capable of dealing with the diversity, unpredictability, and rapidly changing conditions of the real world. Such creatures must make decisions and take actions based on incomplete perception, time constraints, limited knowledge about the world, cognition, reasoning and physical capabilities, in...

Objective: The objective of this study was to design effectively integrated information architecture for a mobile teleoperated robot in remote assistance to the delivery of home health care. Methods: Three role classes were identified related to the deployment of a telerobot, namely, engineer, technology integrator, and health professional. Pati...

Tendon-Driven Manipulators (TDM) have been used in various applications requiring low inertia robots having multiple degrees-of-freedom (DOF) and redundancy. TDMs are generally actuated by gear electric motors placed at the base of the robot, and consequently require complex cable tension feedback from force sensors or dynamic modelling to maintain...

Rehabilitation professionals have little information concerning lower limb exoskeletons for people with paraplegia. This study has four objectives: (1) Outline the characteristics of the exoskeletons' design and their usefulness evidence as assistive mobility devices in the community for the Rewalk™, Mina, Indego®, Ekso™ (previously known as the eL...

Localization of sound sources in adverse environments is an important challenge in robot audition. The target sound source is often corrupted by coherent broadband noise, which introduces localization ambiguities as noise is often mistaken as the target source. To discriminate the time difference of arrival (TDOA) parameters of the target source an...

Telehealth is defined as the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to extend health care service delivery across distance. Remote vital sign monitoring is a common example for home telehealth and one promising market, but lacks the breadth, comforting and subtleties of face-to-face assessments usually done by having either the pat...

QueBall is a spherical robot capable of motion and equipped with touch sensors, multi-colored lights, sounds, and a wireless interface with an iOS device. While these capabilities may be useful in assisting the early diagnosis of autism, no detailed guidelines have yet been established to achieve this. In this report, we described the exploratory s...

Representing the location of sound sources may be helpful when teleoperating a mobile robot. To evaluate this modality, we conducted trials in which the graphical user interface (GUI) displays a blue right icon on the video stream where the sound is located. Results show that such visualization modality provides a clear benefit when a user has to d...

Commercial telepresence robots provide video, audio, and proximity data to remote operators through a teleoperation user interface running on standard computing devices. As new modalities such as force sensing and sound localization are being developed and tested on advanced robotic platforms, ways to integrate such information on a teleoperation i...

Using a powered wheelchair (PW) is a complex task requiring advanced perceptual and motor control skills. Unfortunately, PW incidents and accidents are not uncommon and their consequences can be serious. The objective of this paper is to develop technological tools that can be used to characterize a wheelchair user's driving behavior under various...

It is known that children with autism can benefit from interacting with robotic devices. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the USA identifies around 1 in 68 American children as being on the autism spectrum. Other countries also have similar prevalence rates. Therefore, providing therapeutic devices is becoming of increasing i...