Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR project BARQ

Participants : Jörg Hoffmann, Olivier Buffet, Bruno Scherrer.

This project has been granted by ANR in the “Chaires d'Excellence” program. The project is funded with ca. 400000 EUR and will hire four non-permanent researchers (Doctorants and/or Postdocs). Jörg Hoffmann is the project leader, Olivier Buffet and Bruno Scherrer collaborate. Other collaborators from LORIA are Stephan Merz, Ammar Oulamara, and Martin Quinson. The project also has several international collaborators, in particular Prof. Blai Bonet (Universidad Simon Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela), Prof. Carmel Domshlak (Technion Haifa, Israel), Prof. Hector Geffner (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain), Dr. Malte Helmert (University of Freiburg, Germany), and Prof. Stephen Smith (CMU, Pittsburgh, USA).

The project unites research from four different areas, namely classical planning, probabilistic planning, model checking, and scheduling. The underlying common theme is the development of new methods for computing lower bounds via state aggregation. Specifically, the basic technique investigated allows explicit selection of states to aggregate, in exponentially large state spaces, via an incremental process interleaving it with state space re-construction steps. The two main research questions to be addressed are how to choose the states to aggregate, and how to effectively obtain, in practical scenarios, anytime methods providing solutions with increasingly tighter performance guarantees.

So far, we have hired Dr. Michael Katz as a PostDoc (for 2 years) working on classical planning, and Manel Tagorti as a PhD student (for 3 years) working on probabilistic planning. The Conseil Regional de Lorraine has accepted to co-finance, for 2011, 50% of the the position of Michael Katz for a period of 1 year. Chao-Wen Perng was funded from BARQ for an internship of 5 months during which she worked on her MSc report, laying some basis for the research direction to be followed by Manel Tagorti.

PEPS project GEST - 2010/2011

Participant : Vincent Chevrier.

This project “Gouvernance Enactive des Systèmes de Transports” (GEST) is the consequence of the work undertaken within the GEST project funded by the IXXI ("Institut Rhône Alpin des Systèmes Complexes").

It involves teams from the LIG (Laboratoire d'informatique de Grenoble) and from the LIESP (Laboratoire d'informatique pour l'entreprise et les systèmes de production), and is associated to the CUGN.

This project aims at a fundamental level at proposing an enactive perspective for the governance issue in case of complex socio-technical systems, and more specifically, in case of public transportation systems. From a more applicative perspective, we seek at specifying a participatory and reflexive simulation system based on a multi-agent model.

This exploratory project is grounded on core ideas coming from the IXXI work. It aims at gathering researchers coming from different domains (social cognition, decision theory, simulation, serious game, etc) in order to clarify interdisciplinary issues.

A workshop was organized in the beginning of January 2011 in Lyon followed by three other meetings.

ANR project CARTOMATIC

Participants : Olivier Simonin, François Charpillet, Antoine Bautin.

This project has been granted by ANR in the Robotics Carotte challenge (CArtographie par ROboT d'un TErritoire) from the Contenus et Interactions program. The project is funded with ca. 50000 EUR to purchase the robotics platform. The Maia team was also funded with a PhD fellowship. The Cartomatic consortium is formed by LISA/Angers University (leader), Maia/LORIA and Wany robotics (Montpellier).

This project concerns the mapping of an indoor structured but unknown environment, and the localization of objects, with one or several robots. We aim at studying multi-robot or swarm algorithms to achieve such a challenge, while showing the robustness and the accuracy of the mapping when using cooperation between several autonomous robots. In the work of Antoine Bautin PhD thesis (started in 2009) we have proposed a distributed algorithm XXXXXXXX multi-robot deployment and mapping. (Section  6.2.2.1 ).

INRIA AEN PAL Personally Assisted Living

Participants : François Charpillet, Olivier Simonin.

The PAL project is an INRIA National Initiative (Action d'Envergure Nationale) involving several teams of the institute (Arobas, Coprin, E-motion, Lagadic, Demar, Maia, Prima, Pulsar and Trio). It is coordinated by David Daney (INRIA Sophia-Antipolis EPI Coprin). The project focuses on the design of smart home and robot assistant. Maia is particularly involved in the People Surveillance work package, by studying and experimenting intelligent environments, funded on smart tiles (cf. Sec.  6.2.3.1 ) and multi-sensor devices.

As a first action, the consortium organized a Workshop ”De l'Autonomie au Domicile” in Nice, on November 29 & 30, 2010. http://www-sop.inria.fr/coprin/pal/workshop/

PEA-DGA SUSIE 2009-12

Participants : François Charpillet, Olivier Simonin, Romain Mauffray.

This project relies on results and questions arising from the SMAART project (2006-08). During this project we adapted the EVAP algorithm 6.2.1.4 to the patrol with UAVs, while providing a generic digital pheromone based patrolling simulator Concerning sharing authority, we proposed an original interface to manipulate groups of UAVs. However, experiments with operators have shown that they succeed in improving the whole system when dealing with the patrolling task.

So, the aim of the SUSIE project is twofold: (i) studying and improving parameters of the EVAP algorithm through the SMAART simulator, (ii) defining new ways to manipulate pheromones fields in order to improve the sharing authority.

INRIA ADT project ROMEA (2009-11)

Participants : Olivier Simonin, François Charpillet, Nicolas Beaufort, Alain Dutech, Olivier Buffet.

ROMEA, for “RObots Mobiles et Environnements Actifs”, is a project proposed by the Maia team and funded by INRIA NGE through an ADT “Action de Developpement Technologique”. The project deals with the development and the study of intelligent and collective behaviors with Khepera III mobile robots. In particular we develop a new experimental device, called interactive table for robots, which provides a graphical active environment where robots can read and write pieces of information (e.g. digital pheromones). During 2010, with O. Rochel (INRIA research engineer) and N. Beaufort (INRIA IJD), we designed such a device which is now used for swarm robotics experiments, see Section  6.2.2.2 . Nicolas Beaufort was hired for a second year as an INRIA IJD engineer to develop the required functions on the interactive table and the robots.

CNRS PEPII project “IMAVO” (2011-2012)

Participant : Alain Dutech.

IMAVO, for “Interactions entre Modules pour l'Apprentissage dans un environnement VOlatile”, is a PEPII project of the INSB institute of the CNRS. It involves Alain Marchand and Etienne Coutureau from the INCIA Lab of Bordeaux (Behavioral Neurosciences - INSB), Mehdi Khamassi and Benoît Girard from the ISIR Lab of Paris (Robotics and Neurosciences - INS2I), Alain Dutech and Nicolas Rougier from the Loria Lab of Nancy (Computational Neurosciences and Machine Learning - INS2I).

This project investigates model-based and model-free reinforcement learning approaches for rats learning in volatile environments (i.e. context and reward can change during learning). It aims at designing new concept for modularized decision-making systems, allowing a better understanding of the underlying neuro-biological process involved in rats and humans and applications in the field of autonomous robotics.

It is a logical extension of a cooperation between MaIA and the INCIA Lab of Bordeaux [7] .