Working with deformable and soft materials is becoming an increasingly important research direction in robotics. Although compliant and flexible robots offer significant advantages, including safer interaction and inherent compliance, their use in high-speed manipulation remains largely unexplored.
This PhD project aims to develop robotic solutions that exploit compliant and flexible robots for rapid manipulation tasks, with experimental validation in a waste-sorting application, supported by PEPR Robotique Acceleration program.
The PhD candidate will benefit from a rich scientific environment offered through the collaboration between INRIA (Lille) and LIRMM (Montpellier), two French research groups with worldwide recognition in compliant robotics and high-speed manipulation. The thesis will be co-supervised by researchers from both institutes, with the student spending substantial time at each site to leverage their complementary experimental platforms and expertise.
