4. THE ROBEA PROGRAMME
4. THE ROBEA PROGRAMME
4.1. Robea: an Interdisciplinary National Program in Robotics
The French CNRS has launched in mid 2001 a national program on Robotics, called "Robotics and Artificial Entities" (Robea: Robotique et Entités Artificielles). This interdisciplinary program covers the main research areas of the field, in the department of information sciences and technologies. It also concerns the CNRS departments of engineering sciences, life sciences, and social sciences and humanities. Other national institutes have joined the Robea program and/or are contributing to its funding, among which particularly INRIA and the Ministry of Research.
The Robea program addresses robotics as the interdisciplinary study, design and integration of sensory-motor and cognitive functions. It is concerned with the integration of these functions within machines that are able to achieve autonomously various tasks in open and changing environments, machines that are able to interact with humans and other machines and able to improve their behavior through learning. Most issues concerned with the study and integration of perception-decision-action functions remain relevant and of interest to Robea 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; Problems of perception and motion, of active perception and sensory planning Problems of learning sensory-motor functions, procedures, rules and concepts, and problems of actively planning and achieving actions in order to learn. 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;
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: for the study of natural cognition, learning and social behavior, this covers for example the study of emerging properties of individual or collective behavior; Medical sciences for the development of new robotics aided techniques of clinical inspection, monitoring and surgery.
The Robea program supports collaborative research projects from academic laboratories in France, affiliated to CNRS, to Universities and other public research institutions such as INRIA, ONERA, CEA, INSERM or IFREMER. The program is open to collaborations with the industry and with foreign partners. Over 200 teams contributed to submissions of projects to Robea in 2001 and 2002.
The first call of the program selected 10 projects that are being funded for 2 or 3 years and 5 short projects, funded for one year, eventually renewable. The second call selected 8 projects and 6 short projects.
Robea organizes in the 24th and 25th of October 2002 in Toulouse its first workshop where these projets will present their partial results (see the workshop program in http://www.laas.fr/robea/Activites ).
4.2. Projects in progress
The projects covered or submitted to Robea, both in the first program phase 2001 and in the second one completed in 2002, have been presented and discussed in a two-days workshop (October, Toulouse). The presentations can be accessed at the following web address:
http://www.laas.fr/robea/slides-et-textes/Actes-Robea02.pdf2001 Submitted Projects
2002 Submitted Projects (partial list)