Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

SIMS

• Title: Realistic and Efficient Simulation of Complex Systems

• International Partners:

  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) - GAMMA Group - Ming C. Lin, Dinesh Manocha

  • University of Minnesota (USA) - Motion Lab - Stephen Guy

  • Brown University (USA) - VenLab - William Warren

• Start year: 2012

• See http://people.rennes.inria.fr/Julien.Pettre/EASIMS/easims.html

• The general goal of SIMS is to make significant progress toward realistic and efficient simulation of highly complex systems, which raise combinatory explosive problems. This proposal is focused on human motion and interaction, and covers 3 active topics with wide application range:

  1. Crowd simulation: virtual human interacting with other virtual humans,

  2. Autonomous virtual humans interacting with their environment,

  3. Physical simulation: real humans interacting with virtual environments.

  SIMS is orthogonally structured by transversal questions: the evaluation of the level of realism reached by a simulation (which is a problem by itself in the considered topics), considering complex systems at various scales (micro, meso and macroscopic ones), and facing combinatory explosion of simulation algorithms.

ISI4NAVE

• Title: Innovative Sensors and adapted Interfaces for assistive NAVigation and pathology Evaluation

• International Partner:

  • University College London (United Kingdom) - Aspire CREATe - Tom Carlson

• Start year: 2016

• See http://www.irisa.fr/lagadic/team/MarieBabel/ISI4NAVE/ISI4NAVE.html

• The global ageing population, along with disability compensation constitute major challenging societal and economic issues. In particular, achieving autonomy remains a fundamental need that contributes to the individual’s wellness and well-being. In this context, innovative and smart technologies are designed to achieve independence while matching user’s individual needs and desires.

  Hence, designing a robotic assistive solution related to wheelchair navigation remains of major importance as soon as it compensates partial incapacities. This project will then address the following two issues. First, the idea is to design an indoor / outdoor efficient obstacle avoidance system that respects the user intention, and does not alter user perception. This involves embedding innovative sensors to tackle the outdoor wheelchair navigation problem. The second objective is to take advantage of the proposed assistive tool to enhance the user Quality of Experience by means of biofeedback. Indeed, adapted interfaces should improve the understanding of people that suffer from cognitive and/or visual impairments.

  The originality of the project is to continuously integrate medical validation as well as clinical trials during the scientific research work in order to match user needs and acceptation.

• Alexandre Krupa has a collaboration with Prof. Nassir Navab from the Technical University of Munich concerning the joint supervision of Pierre Chatelain's Ph.D. (see Section 7.3.2).

The Lagadic group is one of the few external partners of the Australian Center for Robotic Vision (see http://roboticvision.org). It groups QUT in Brisbane, ANU in Canberra, Monash University and Adelaide University. In the scope of this project, Peter Corke and Ben Upcroft spent a short visit in May 2016 while Jurgen Leitner spent a 1-month visit in October 2016.