Maxim Vochten

• Doctor of Engineering
• Senior Researcher at Royal Military Academy

The ability of robots to recognize human gestures facilitates a natural and accessible human-robot collaboration. However, most work in gesture recognition remains rooted in reference frame-dependent representations. This poses a challenge when reference frames vary due to different work cell layouts, imprecise frame calibrations, or other environm...

Trajectory segmentation refers to dividing a trajectory into meaningful consecutive sub-trajectories. This paper focuses on trajectory segmentation for 3D rigid-body motions. Most segmentation approaches in the literature represent the body’s trajectory as a point trajectory, considering only its translation and neglecting its rotation. We propose...

Invariant descriptors of point and rigid-body motion trajectories have been proposed in the past as representative task models for motion recognition and generalization. Currently, no invariant descriptor exists for representing force trajectories, which appear in contact tasks. This article introduces invariant descriptors for force trajectories b...

Invariant descriptors of point and rigid-body motion trajectories have been proposed in the past as representative task models for motion recognition and generalization. Currently, no invariant descriptor exists for representing force trajectories which appear in contact tasks. This paper introduces invariant descriptors for force trajectories by e...

Knee angles are kinematic quantities that are commonly presented in gait analysis reports. They are typically calculated as the relative angles between the anatomical coordinate systems rigidly attached to the femur and the tibia. To give these angles a biomechanical meaning, the coordinate systems must be defined with respect to some anatomical la...

The instantaneous (ISA) and average (ASA) screw axes are techniques commonly adopted in motion analysis to functionally locate the rotation axis and center of rotation of a joint. Several approaches for calculating such axes were proposed in literature and the main limitations were identified as the need for using a threshold on angular displacemen...

This paper introduces a constraint-based specification of an object handover in order to simplify the implementation of reactive handover controllers. A number of desired robot behaviors are identified in different phases of the handover and specified as constraints. The degrees-of-freedom in the reaching motion towards the tracked object, such as...

Variation in task requirements and operation in uncertain environments require robots that can continuously adapt their motions during execution. To do this successfully, the original motion characteristics must be preserved. This paper presents an approach for on-line adaptation of end effector trajectories for robot manipulators. The trajectory g...

The motion of a rigid body can be represented by the instantaneous screw axis (ISA, also known as the helical axis). Recently, an invariant representation of motion based on the ISA, namely, the screw axis invariant descriptor (SAID), was proposed in the literature. The SAID consists of six scalar features that are independent from the coordinate s...

In learning by demonstration, the generalization of motion trajectories far away from the set of demonstrations is often limited by the dependency of the learned models on arbitrary coordinate references. Trajectory shape descriptors have the potential to remove these dependencies by representing demonstrated trajectories in a coordinate-free way....

(Semi-) autonomous complex UAV missions, such as inspection or search-and-rescue in uncertain dynamic environments, require obstacle avoidance and operator shared control. Combining humans' cognitive abilities with fast automation is the key for such missions. This paper presents a flight control system architecture based on the instantaneous Task...

This paper presents an overview and comparison of minimal and complete rigid body motion trajectory descriptors, usable in applications like motion recognition and programming by demonstration. Motion trajectory descriptors are able to deal with potentially unwanted variations acting on the motion trajectory such as changes in the execution time, t...