Jean-Paul Laumond, IEEE Fellow, is a roboticist and a Director of Research at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse, France. He has a degree in Mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Robotics and Habilitation from the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. He has been a member of the French Comité National de la Recherche Scientifique from 1991 to 1995 and a co-director of the French-Japanese lab JRL from 2005 to 2008. Laumond has been coordinator of two the European Esprit projects, both dedicated to robot motion planning and control. He created and managed Kineo CAM, a company devoted to developing and marketing motion planning technologies, which was awarded the French Research Ministry prize for innovation and enterprise in 2000 and the third IEEE-IFR prize for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Robotics and Automation in 2005.
In 2006, he launched the research team Gepetto dedicated to Human Motion studies along three perspectives: artificial motion for humanoid robots, virtual motion for digital actors and mannequins, and natural motions of human beings.
Laumond has published more than 150 papers in international journals and conferences in Robotics, Computer Science, Automatic Control and Neurosciences. His current project Actanthrope is devoted to the computational foundations of anthropomorphic action.