Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

Contracts with Industry

Toyota Motors Europe

[Feb 2006 - Feb 2009] [Dec 2010 - Dec 2014]

The contract with Toyota Motors Europe is a joint collaboration involving Toyota Motors Europe, INRIA and ProBayes. It follows a first successful short term collaboration with Toyota in 2005.

This contract aims at developing innovative technologies in the context of automotive safety. The idea is to improve road safety in driving situations by equipping vehicles with the technology to model on the fly the dynamic environment, to sense and identify potentially dangerous traffic participants or road obstacles, and to evaluate the collision danger. The sensing is performed using sensors commonly used in automotive applications such as cameras and lidar.

This collaboration has been extended for 4 years and Toyota provides us with an experimental vehicle Lexus equipped with various sensing and control capabilities.

Renault

[Jan 2010 - Feb 2013]

This contract is linked to the PhD Thesis of Stephanie Lefèvre. The objective is to develop technologies for collaborative driving as part of a Driving Assistance Systems for improving car safety. Both vehicle perception and communications are considered in the scope of this study.

GRAAL

[January 2009 - January 2011]

The Graal project aims to produce a generic behaviour construction toolkit for video games and small autonomous robots. It is based on probabilist modelling techniques, and will last two years, starting in January 2009. It involves four partners :

• INRIA/e-Motion provides the core scientific basis for probabilist modelling and autonomous robot programming;

• Probayes ("Born of INRIA" in 2003) builds upon its generic Bayesian inference engine ProBT, and its expertise of decision systems;

• POB-Technology develops small robots for education and entertainment, sold in high schools and universities all over the world;

• Ageod (in the project during its first year) developed simulation-like historic strategy games.

The goal of the project is the extension and application of Bayesian modelling techniques for industrial behaviour construction :

• programming and maintaining complex behaviours for virtual entities; - teaching simple behaviours to small robots;

• bringing behaviour modification into the hands of students and hobbyists;

• integrating probabilistic reasoning into the tools of industrial behaviour programmers.

The Graal project is funded as a FUI (Fonds Unitaire Interministériel) project by the French Ministère de l'Industrie, the Rhône-Alpes region, and the Greater Lyon metropolitan area. It is labelled and supported by the Imaginove (game and entertainment) and Minalogic (intelligent miniaturized products) clusters.

PROTEUS

[November 2009 - October 2013]

PROTEUS (“Robotic Platform to facilitate transfer between Industries and academics”) is an ANR project involving 6 industrial and 7 academic partners. This projects aims to develop a software platform which helps to share methods and softwares between academics and industries in the field of mobile robotics.

The project works on three main aspects :

• Specification of different scenarios and its associated formalism.

• Definition of a domain specific language (DSL) to specify and execute the given scenarios.

• Setting up 4 robotic challenges to evaluate the capacity and the usability of the platform.

The contribution of e-Motion to PROTEUS is first to provide its expertise on mobile robotics to develop the DSL and next to provide a simulation environment with its platform “CycabTK”.

Juan Lahera-Perez has been recruited as engineer to work on this project with Amaury Nègre.