2. ROBEA, AN INTERDISCIPLINARY NATIONAL PROGRAM IN ROBOTICS

The CNRS has launched recently a wide and ambitious national program on Robotics, called "Robotique et Entités Artificielles" (Robea). This interdisciplinary program covers the main research areas of the field, in Computer Science, Signal processing and Control. It also concerns other areas in engineering, in life sciences, in cognitive sciences and in social sciences and humanities.

The Robea program addresses robotics as the study and design of sensory-motor and decision functions. It is concerned with their integration within machines that are able to achieve autonomously various tasks in open and changing environments, that are able to interact with humans and other machines and able to improve their behavior through learning. Most issues concerned with the integration of perception-decision-action functions remain relevant when these cognitive functions are not embodied within a single machine but distributed over a network of sensors, of actuators, of processing and communication equipments.

Consequently the program covers all areas of robotics in a broad sense, and in particular through the issues of their multidisciplinary integration. These are for example:

• Problems for consistent modeling of the environment through multiple heterogeneous representations, e.g., numerical grids, geometrical, topological, functional and semantic maps (landmarks, objects of various types, contexts, situations, etc.);

• Problems of perception and motion: visual servoing, robust localization and control with multiple modalities and redundant exteroceptive sensors;

• Problems of active perception and sensory planning: viewpoint selection, choice of sensors, of sensing and processing modalities, information gathering strategies for environment exploration or modeling, scene interpretation, etc.;

• Problems of planning and decision making, online, while acting, sensing, communicating and coordinating activities in a distributed interaction; other relevant issues here are those of the architecture of a complex machine, its organization, its bounded rationality, and issues of rational agents in informational systems;

• Problems of learning sensory-motor functions, procedures, rules and concepts, and problems of actively planning and achieving actions in order to learn.

In addition to the main disciplines in Information Sciences and Technologies, Robea also covers the following areas:

• Mechanics and material engineering: design of specific actuators, new materials for artificial muscles, mechanical properties of specific systems (flexible, with mechanical loops) or components (legs, arms, hands), bio-mechanical problems in tele-operation, simulation, virtual reality;

• Neurosciences: interaction between different approaches to the study and modeling of sensory-motor and cognitive functions;

• Humanities and social sciences: particularly with respect to the problems of Human-robot interactions through different modalities, for the cooperation, the interactive problem solving and task carrying, and in the study of collective behavior;

• Cognitive sciences: through interdisciplinary approaches involving various representations and experiments for the study of natural cognition, decision making, learning and social behavior, this covers for example the study of emerging properties of individual or collective behavior within artificial life and evolution-based approaches;

• Medical sciences for the development through close interdisciplinary collaborations of new robotics aided techniques of clinical inspection, monitoring and surgery.

The Robea program will support collaborative research projects from academic laboratories in France, affiliated to CNRS, or to Universities and other public research institutions. Several institutes such as INRIA, ONERA, CEA, INSERM or IFREMER have already expressed an interest in the program and may contribute to its funding. The program is open to collaborations with the industry and with foreign partners. The initial call of the program has received, last June, 44 submitted projects; about a third of them will get funded and will start during the fall 2001. Other calls of proposals are scheduled in 2002 and in 2003.