1. STATUS AND CURRENT ACTIVITY OVERVIEW
1. STATUS AND CURRENT ACTIVITY OVERVIEW
1.1. IARP Directions
The current IARP charter with new features such as the creation of Working Groups emphasizes our role in capacity "to foster international cooperation toward the development of advanced robotic systems able to dispense with human exposure to difficult activities in harsh, demanding or dangerous conditions or environments".
Indeed, front-line novel application domains and scientific and technical issues challenge both robotics researchers as well as social, economical, and political decision makers.
Two synergic work avenues are of paramount importance and call for action.
First, at the level of basic research, we should foster a host of technologies ranging from the design of very novel mechanical devices to the most advanced techniques in machine communication and intelligence.
Second, a broad host of new real-world applications are to be considered and developed:
- Humankind frontier domains: encompasses applications of intervention robots for hostile and/or remote sites such as planet exploration ; subsea operation ; Earth difficult environments such as Antarctica, volcanoes...
- Field-based applications such as mining, tunneling, dangerous waste and artifacts handling, forestry, agriculture, ...
- Drones, cars, public-safety machines, professional cleaning, construction and civil work robots, surveillance, sewer inspection and maintenance, warehousing and inter-modal transportation, professional servicing and catering.
- Remote task execution by users and expert monitoring and assistance: plant maintenance, servicing, medical assistance, health care, ...
- Entertainment: toys, artificial pets, games, educational robots, ...
- Public oriented services: public places servicing (airports, museums,…), hospitals delivery, surveillance/safeguarding, ...
- Assistive and Personal Robots : Medicine, Rehabilitation, Household (cleaning, surveillance, ...), Assistance to the impaired or elderly (companion robots, effective servicing, care, ...).
1.2. Current activity and report overview
France research activity in the field of Robotics, in the general context of the domain covered by emARP, is carried on, as in other developed countries, in every University, Engineering School, Public R&D emnstitution, and in many corporate organizations. emn this framework, the overall activity encompasses the major research programmes and actions which are pursued both at the national level and via international programmes by National Research organizations such as CNRS, emNRemA and University laboratories together with domain-oriented organizations such as CEA (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique), EDF (Electricité de France), CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales), emFREMER (institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer).
This major characteristic was clearly apparent in the large projects, national and international programs reported in past reports. emn 1999, we choose to highlight four selected domains: Nuclear applications, Underwater, Medical robotics, Field robotics.
emn keeping with this pattern, the choice has been made for the current report to focus on activities that directly concern events in this yearly period and some of the main directions where emARP is engaged today.
This partial activity report comprises fives sections encompassing a large spectrum of activities. The projects presented this year led by three laboratories from CNRS, three from emNRemA and one from emFREMER illustrate in multiple ways the network of cooperative actions which are at the core of the French Robotics research activity.
First of all, worth to mention here are the perspectives open by the Ministry of Science and Technology with new programs among which:
a call for emncentive Cooperative Actions (ACem: Action Concertée emncitative). Among the subjects, we can expect to be covered in this context. We should see themes such as Assistive and Personal Robotics, Demining, and multi-disciplinary themes associating Biology, Computer Science and Robot Human Augmentation.
the Health-Technology National Network which includes the theme of Medical Robotics
Five sections will present current activities and important events in the following selected domains:
These report sections attempt to illustrate both some of the efforts within the framework of novel robotics R&D directions and the close relation with emARP general activities.
This is obviously the case for Underwater Robotics which corresponds to a long standing emARP endeavour. Furthermore, the activities reported in this field should play a key role in the forthcoming organization of the 6th Underwater emARP WS.
Another long standing emARP effort which concerns extreme environments and field robotics, is most actively pursued with the central topics of Humanitarian Demining, Construction and Civil Works, and Remote Hostile-Sites emntervention.
emn the domain of Robotic Systems, we have included significative activities which expand the field of Robotics to the very broad field of unmanned vehicles, namely cars here, and the vast growing world of CAE (Computer Assisted Engineering) and Virtual Reality.
Among the salient features of Robotics today, the design and the control of biped robots has been particularly enlightened by the humanoid concept. emn this domain design as well as efficient and robust controls are key features. The project presented relies on advanced mathematically well established control theory. A similar feature can be found in the design and control of parallel mechanism whose application interest ranges from assembly systems to the highlights of surgical applications. Here, sophisticated mathematical tools are used from the start with concept optimal analysis.
Last, and of paramount importance, there are the development efforts within the Grand Challenge opened by Assistive and Personal Robotics. emn relation to this, particularly worth to mention is the very successful symposium "Human-Friendly Robotics" organized by France in cooperation with emtaly and the European Union, with the cooperation of Japan's AemST-MemTem, in November 1999. This symposium convened:
twenty experts from Japan, eighteen speakers and chairs and two observers,
fifteen speakers and chairs from Europe and four organizers.
Among the symposium summary, comments and conclusions (G. Giralt, H. emnoue, K. Tanie), the following excerpts seem of particular interest to be quoted here:
[...]
emn good correspondence to a general trend in robotics research in Japan and building on the current major effort of the five years research program on Humanoid Robots, three key aspects were highlighted:
The major effort on humanoid robots with a clear objective to provide a set of research platforms.
The many-folded developments in human machine interfaces emphasizing the role of the "Kanseï" concept and including spectacular technological developments in tele-existence.
- Effective market penetration with artificial pets.
The presentations from Europe appeared clearly rooted in recent work in the field of service robots and for most of them were attempting to blend concepts related to machine intelligence for human-robot interaction.
[...]
emn spite of the current lack of any central project, important commonalties in domain-oriented research issues and key applications were demonstrated:
Public service oriented robots and assistive devices such as autonomous cleaning robots are considered with an attempt to find realistic short or mid-term applications
Elderly and impaired people assistive robotics corresponds already to a large amount of mature work
Operational robot dependability (robot safety,…) was presented as a central technological factor deserving special consideration
[...]
The symposium clearly demonstrated that beyond obvious differences in technical priorities and the presence or the lack of a central large-scale program, key aspects are similarly developed both in Japan and in Europe, attempting to meet the challenges of a front-line domain of robotics.
Certainly one of the major challenges consists in the capacity to fully use new developments in technology as a decisive support to develop robotics as a scientific field.
All the speakers presented concepts and results illustrating a robot as an intelligent machine. A very demanding but highly interesting endeavor appears to be to move robotics from being an addendum to Computer Science, Control Theory, Mechanical Engineering, Mechatronics, ... to become a full-breadth scientific field expanding on machine intelligence topics and issues.
[...]