September 8th, 2021, 9:15 AM – CGI Keynote 2
Dr. Nicolas Pronost
Title : Motion control and prediction of virtual characters
Abstract : Knowledge of the motion and loading of the human body and its parts is essential in many fields of human medicine and in particular in orthopedic and trauma surgery. Modern numerical methods have advanced to the point that they are useful for estimating forces in the relevant structures based on a priori knowledge motion and external loading. However, their general usefulness is limited by their inability to predict motion and loading in response to changes in the body caused by disease or as a result of applying a given therapy to treat a disease. In this talk, we will discuss several of our works dealing with either motion control, motion prediction or both. Different controller designs, models and virtual environments will be presented including data-driven approaches to replicate reference motions and the control of partially immersed bipeds. Ongoing projects with applications to clinical scenario will also be introduced.
Bio : Dr. Nicolas Pronost is currently an Assistant Professor at the University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (France). He received his Ph.D degree in Computer Science from University Rennes 1 (France) in 2006 after which he worked as a postdoctoral researcher successively at the Zhejiang University of Hangzhou (China) and at EPFL (Switzerland). He was then Assistant Professor at Utrecht University (The Netherlands) from 2010 to 2014 where he also acted as the head of a motion capture facility. His research interests include physics-based animation, musculoskeletal simulation, motion control and motion prediction. He is member of several program committees of international conferences on computer graphics and computer animation. He is the principal investigator of several research projects on motion prediction and their applications to clinical situations.