Me
I am a robotics control engineer working on the Grip4All project. Since October 2025, I am mainly involved in setting up robust robotic control for palletising tasks. This includes the use of MPC in the context of two-arm tasks.
Under the supervision of Margot Vulliez and David Daney, I defended in September 2025 a thesis in collaboration with Farm3 and the AUCTUS team entitled “Assisting humans through adaptable haptic guidance, application to remote-controlled vertical farming”
Before that, I had been working as an engineer for 2 months, setting up an experiment for Benjamin Camblor’s thesis. Back then I was freshly graduated from the engineering school Télécom Physique Strasbourg.
My PhD
Assisting humans through adaptable haptic guidance, application to remote-controlled vertical farming
Keywords : Haptic Guidance, Human-Robot Interaction, Sharing autonomy, Teleoperation
Abstract : In vertical farming, teleoperation enables human skills to be leveraged for plant manipulation while maintaining a pest and disease free growing environment. A key component of teleoperation is the exchange of information between the operator and the robotic system such as visual feedback (video streams) and haptic feedback (physical interaction cues with the environment). This thesis focuses on the use of haptic feedback through haptic guidance.
Haptic guidance is designed to assist the operator in controlling the robot by encouraging movement in a specific direction, along a predefined path, or by restricting access to certain areas through guiding forces. It relies on two main components : a guidance model and a virtual object. The model determines a force profile based on the distance to the virtual object. For haptic guidance to be effective, both elements must be carefully defined ; otherwise, the guidance may negatively impact task performance. Since these components are usually pre-defined, adapting them in dynamic environments like vertical farming can be challenging. Our goal is to develop a generic and online-adaptable haptic guidance approach that adjusts in real time based on the complexity of both the task and the environment by evaluating the human-guidance interaction.
Here is a list of all my publications
Journal articles 24 documents
Conference papers 24 documents
Preprints 24 documents
Thesis 24 documents
Reports 24 documents
Book chapters 24 documents
Patents 24 documents
Related topics #aboulay
The PhD work of Alexis was presented at Eurohaptics 2026. It contributes to haptic guidance in teleoperation with guidelines to properly define and select a haptic guidance model and to evaluate the human-guidance interaction.
Abstract Haptic guidance in teleoperation enhances operator performance through force feedback. This paper presents guidelines to select the most appropriate model considering the task, the environment and the operator. We define a unified \added{formulation} expressing …
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We were pleased to see Alexis Boulay defend his PhD thesis on “Assisting humans through adaptable haptic guidance, application to remote-controlled vertical farming”.
Abstract In vertical farming, teleoperation enables human skills to be leveraged for plant manipulation while maintaining a pest and disease free growing environment. A key component of teleoperation is the exchange of information between the operator and the robotic system such as visual feedback (video streams) and haptic …
[Read More]
As part of the SHAARE associate team, between Auctus (Inria) and the IRiS lab (Kaist), PhD student Alexis Boulay visited KAIST University between September and November. The visit led to discussions on collaborating on the adaptation of haptic guidance geometry based on teleoperation context.
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