Oussama Bey, a PhD candidate in the SIRIUS team, will defend his thesis on January 27 2026, in the RT Amphitheater at the UPEC campus in Vitry-sur-Seine, located at 120 rue Paul Armangot, 94400 Vitry-sur-Seine.
Title : Robust and Adaptive Assistive Control Approaches for an Active Ankle–Foot Orthosis
Thesis director : Yacine Amirat
General overview :
"Lower-limb exoskeletons represent a major breakthrough in assistive robotics, aiming to restore or enhance human motor capabilities by providing assistive torques at the hip, knee, and ankle joints. Among these exoskeletons, the Actuated Ankle–Foot Orthosis (AAFO) plays a key role in supporting dorsiflexion and plantarflexion movements of the foot, helping correct the foot-drop phenomenon and ensuring proper foot clearance. The success of such devices depends on advanced control approaches that ensure accurate trajectory tracking, robustness to parametric uncertainties and external disturbances, and rapid detection of the wearer’s locomotion mode (walking context) to provide timely context-aware assistance across scenarios such as level walking, stair ascent/descent, and ramp ascent/descent. This thesis develops advanced control approaches for an AAFO under the assist-as-needed paradigm, ensuring that only the necessary level of assistance is provided to the user."