Nicolas Mansard

Nicolas Mansard is a permanent researcher at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse, France, where he has been working since October 2008. He is a member of the Gepetto research group alongside Philippe Souères, Florent Lamiraux, Olivier Stasse, and Jean-Paul Laumond. He defended his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) in July 2013 on the topic of motion semiotics. In 2013, he was an invited researcher at Emo Todorov's lab at the University of Washington, Seattle.

His research focuses on sensor-based control, particularly the integration of sensor-based schemes into humanoid robot applications. His work spans the intersection of robotics, automatic control, signal processing, and numerical mathematics, with humanoid robotics as his primary application field. Mansard has made significant contributions to hierarchical quadratic programming for fast online humanoid-robot motion generation, inverse dynamics control, and sensor-based control systems.

Mansard has received prestigious awards including the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2015 and the Grand Prix de l'ANR in 2016 for his project ANR Entracte. His research has resulted in numerous publications in top robotics journals and conferences, with a focus on motion generation, control theory, and humanoid robotics applications. His work has been particularly influential in developing efficient algorithms for hierarchical task control and inverse dynamics.

• 2015 CNRS Bronze Medal for research in robotics
• Grand Prix de l'ANR in 2016 for project ANR Entracte
• Associate Editor for IEEE TRO since July 2013

Mansard has advised numerous PhD students including Justin Carpentier, Mathieu Geisert, Oscar Ramos, and Sovannara Hak. He has secured significant research funding including leading the ANR project ENTRACTE (starting November 2013) and serving as CNRS coordinator and work package leader for the FP7 EuRoc project. He has also taught courses in advanced robotics at Supaero, mathematics for motion generation at École Normale Supérieure, and experimental humanoid robotics at INSA, all in Toulouse.

His research group has been involved in developing open-source software for motion generation, notably the Stack of Tasks framework, which has been widely adopted in the robotics community. His work on humanoid robot dance with HRP-2 demonstrated the practical applications of his theoretical contributions to motion generation and control.