Achille Melingui is Associate Professor at the National Advanced School of Engineering, University of Yaoundé 1, Cameroon. He is also coordinator of the Experimentation and Production Center, and head of the Robotics and Vision research team at the same school. Before joining the University of Yaoundé 1, he obtained his Ph.D in robotics from the University of Lille, France, and obtained his “Habilitation à diriger des recherches” from the same university in 2021. He also holds a three-year fellowship from the Stellenbosh Institute of Advanced Study (STIAS).

Achille Melingui’s research focuses on model-free approaches to modeling and controlling intelligent systems. He is mainly interested in autonomous robot navigation and soft robots. In autonomous navigation robots, his team uses local navigation approaches such as fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks for autonomous navigation of mobile robots. For soft robots, they focus on the development of learning control architectures that maintain multiple inverse kinematic solutions, and on fault-tolerant control of the latter.

As a fellow at HIAS, Achille will work on the production of an assistance tools for blind or visually impaired people (BVIP). BVIP are increasingly encountering difficulties in their daily lives. The urban congestion of modern cities makes it more difficult for BVIP to get around. How can blind or visually impaired people be better accompanied in their daily lives? Which control architecture for an assistance that is not only inexpensive, but also appropriate to different environments (households, cities, countryside)? This research project aims at developing an aid tool, which will describe (by auditory feedback) each time the environment to blind people: the objects which surround them (static or mobile), the living beings (people or animals), and the free spaces for eventual moves. The particularity of the proposed solution will lie in the presentation of a complete solution integrating deep learning structures in a portable, low-cost, reliable and high-performance hardware. .Moreover, the platform will benefit from a high flexibility by allowing the addition of new objects to its internal database in a simple way to meet the changing needs of the user.

Achille Melingui’s tandem partners in Hamburg are Prof Alexander Schläfer from the TU Hamburg/ Institute for Medical Technology and Intelligent Systems, and Prof Sven Degenhardt from the University of Hamburg/ Department of Education for Disability and Disadvantage.

Achille Melinguis HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.