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About

Michel Drouin is a leading researcher in robotic manipulation and control, with a career spanning foundational work in force-position control to advanced visual servoing for autonomous object reconstruction. His most influential contributions center on hybrid control schemes for robots interacting with physical environments. His seminal 2005 paper, "A new scheme for hybrid force-position control," which has garnered 37 citations, addresses the critical challenge of controlling both the position and contact forces of a manipulator when constrained by its environment—a fundamental problem in tasks like assembly and grinding. This work builds on an earlier 1993 iteration (28 citations) and extends into coordinated multi-robot control, as seen in his 1996 paper on hybrid external control for two-robot motion (26 citations). More recently, Drouin has pioneered methods for automatic 3D reconstruction of unknown objects using a single eye-in-hand camera, enabling robots to autonomously observe, model, and grasp unfamiliar objects. His 2010 paper on automatic observation for 3D reconstruction (10 citations) and his 2009 work on progressive reconstruction (7 citations) represent a shift toward perception-driven manipulation. Drouin’s research is highly impactful in industrial and service robotics, bridging classical control theory with modern computer vision to create more autonomous, adaptable robotic systems.