Prof. Vincent HUGEL

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Vincent HugelMember of COSMER Lab

Full Professor, section n°60

Tel : 04 83 16 66 30

E-mail : vincent.hugel at univ-tln.fr

 

 

Bio

After a civil engineering degree from the French Superior National School ‘Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Nancy’ and a post-diploma in Robotics and Automation Engineering from the French Institute of Nuclear Sciences and Techniques of Saclay, I achieved a PhD at the University of Paris VI in 1999 in the Paris Robotics Lab on the control of hexapod and quadruped robots under the supervision of Prof. P. Coiffet and Ass.-Prof.
P. Blazevic. After 1999 I developed research activities in quadruped locomotion in the context of a Post-Doc funded by the SONY company.
I continued to work on terrestrial mobile robotics from 2000 as I was recruited as an Ass.-Prof. at the University of Versailles in the Industrial computing and electrical engineering of the institute of technology. In particular I focused my research activities on humanoid and avian biped robotics. In 2007 I obtained the accreditation to supervise research at the System Engineering Lab of Versailles, whose dissertation dealt with locomotion and behavior autonomy of legged robots.

Research

I was recruited in 2014 as a full professor at the University of Toulon in the Mechanical engineering and computer-integrated manufacturing department of the institute of technology, with the mission to set up a robotics lab.
This laboratory was created officially in Dec. 2014 and was recognized as a research hosting team by the Ministry in June 2015. Within this context, I worked to kick-start a research activity in the field of marine robotics, in partnership with companies and institutes located in the region.
The main topic that I put forward deals with mobility and autonomy of marine, underwater and terrestrial robots, with the mid-term objective to design and build innovative amphibious systems. My research activities cover the design of innovative mechatronic systems in terms of mobility, the development of autonomous behaviors for robotic applications, and the generation of robotic trajectories for additive manufacturing.

Thesis supervision

Defended theses (from nomination as a professor at UTLN)

  • Matheus Laranjeira (Jan. 2016- April 2019), 40% – co-supervision with Claire Dune
  • Aïda Feddaoui (Oct. 2016-May 2020), 25% – co-supervision with E. Busvelle (LIS) and N. Boizot (LIS)
  • Nicolas Gartner (Oct. 2016-June 2020), 40% – co-supervision with Mathieu Richier
  • Maxime Chalvin (Sept. 2017-July 2020), 30% – co-supervision with Sébastien Campocasso
  • Ornella Tortorici (Nov. 2017-Dec. 2021), 30% – co-direction with Hervé Barthélémy (IM2NP), co-supervision with Cédric Anthierens
  • Lewis Andurand (Oct. 2019-August 2023), 30% – co-supervision with Sébastien Campocasso and Mathieu Museau (G-SCOP)
  • Juliette Drupt (Nov. 2020-Nov. 2023), 30% – co-supervision with Claire Dune and Andrew Comport (I3S-CNRS)
  • Clémentin Boittiaux (Nov. 2020-Dec. 2023), 25% – co-supervision with Claire Dune, Ricard Marxer (LIS) and Aurélien Arnaubec (Ifremer)
  • Bilal Ghader (Dec. 2020-nov. 2024), 30% – co-direction with Eric Watelain (J-AP2S), co-supervision with Claire Dune and Jérémy Nicola (Notilo-plus company)
  • Alexis Claude (June 2022-Dec. 2025), 30% – co-supervision with Maxime Chalvin and Sébastien Campocasso
  • Charly Péraud (Sept. 2022-Dec. 2025), 50% – co-direction with Cédric Anthierens

Ongoing theses

  • Louis Jouclas (Oct. 2023-), 10% – co-direction with Vincent Creuze (Univ. of Montpellier), Claire Dune (UTLN) and Maxime Ferrera (Ifremer)
  • Mathis Riera (oct. 2023-), 20%, co-supervision with Maxime Chalvin and Sébastien Campocasso
  • Matthis Guilleray (oct. 2025-), 30%, co-supervision with Claire Dune and Eric Watelain

Collective and administrative responsibilities

  • Elected member of the Board of the University of Toulon 2015-2019
  • Member of Doctoral School Committee named ‘548 Mer et Sciences’ since (2015-2025)
  • Member of the pole dedicated to Computer Science, Digital data analysis, and prevention of the University of Toulon (2015-2025)
  • Elected member of the department committee of the Mechanical engineering and computer-integrated manufacturing department since 2016
  • Jury chair for 2nd year admission in Mechanical engineering and computer-integrated manufacturing (GMP) since 2015
  • Educational officer of the MIR Erasmus Mundus master’s program (2020-2026).
  • Interim administrator of the multi-drone center (CMD), created in June 2025.

Scientific outreach

  • Member of Program Committe of the ECMR conference (European Conference on Mobile Robots).
  • Cosmer scientific responsibility of project named Surfbot.
  • UTLN Scientific Manager for the EU Interreg Marittimo Fabis project (2025-2028), UTLN link.
  • UTLN Scientific Manager for the PERSEO PERP project (Safe Cooperative Perception in Opend and Evolving Environments for Robot Autonomy) (2025-2032).

Teaching

My teaching activities concern computational mechanics at the GMP department, terrestrial mobile robotics in the training programme named SYSMER (Mechanical and Robotic Systems) of the Engineering school of the University, terrestrial robotics, underwater robotics and modeling of mechanical systems in the first year of the master named ISC (Engineering of Complex systems), in the training programme named Intelligent Robotics and Embedded Systems (RISE), and in the training program MIR (Erasmus Mundus), and bio-inspired robotics in the 2nd year of Master ISC/RISE.