Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Grants with Industry

Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain

The team has been collaborating with Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in the context of the elaboration of the exhibition “Mathematical: A Beautiful Elsewhere” (http://fondation.cartier.com ), to be held from October 2011 to March 2012, as well as with artist David Lynch, to build the robotic installation/experiment Ergo-Robots/FLOWERS Fields. This robotic installation illustrates, as well as allows to experiment in a realistic setup on the long term, computational models of curiosity-driven learning, human-robot interaction and language formation. Fondation Cartier participated to the funding of this experiment/installation. A dedicated web page is available at: http://flowers.inria.fr/ergo-robots.php

Honda Research Institute USA Inc.

Alexander Gepperth is collaborating with Honda Research Institute USA Inc. to implement and evaluate a real-time pedestrian detection and pose classification system with the goal of creating an industrial product in the coming years. Particular aspects of the project are robustness and real-time capability. Robustness is approached by the use of state-of-the-art image feature representations, a sophisticated hierarchy of linear and non-linear support vector classifiers, and dedicated tracking algorithms. Real-time capability is ensured by running the time-critical parts of the whole-image search on a GPU. A particular focus of the project is the use of synthetically rendered pedestrian images for detector training, which ameliorates the problem of insufficient training data. This work has been submitted to the "International Conference On Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition" (CVPR) as well as the "Intelligent Vehicles Symposium" (IV). Honda Research Institute USA Inc. support Alexander Gepperth by financing a post-doctoral researcher at ENSTA ParisTech during one year, grant volume: 50.000USD.

Robert Kostal GmbH

Alexander Gepperth has collaborated with Robert Kostal GmbH, Dortmund (Germany) on the subject of real-time pose recognition from 3D camera data. This project was conducted mainly through an internship student financed by Robert Kostal GmbH.

Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH

Alexander Gepperth and Louis-Charles Caron have collaborated with Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH, Offenbach (Germany) on the subject of real-time shape recognition for robotics. This project was conducted through an internship student financed by Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH, and through the visit of Louis-Charles Caron to Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH in summer 2012.

Pal Robotics

Freek Stulp is continuing his collaboration with Pal Robotics in Barcelona to implement and evaluate the use of Dynamic Motion Primitives on the commercial mobile platform 'Reem '. A particular focus of this project is to compare the respective advantages of motion primitives and sampling-based motion planning approaches in the context of human-robot interaction. Pal Robotics is supporting Freek Stulp by co-financing travel costs for regular project meetings in Barcelona: http://www.pal-robotics.com/blog/freek-stulp-visited-pal-robotics/ . In 2012 this collaboration has lead to a paper at Humanoids [45] , and a video at IROS, which was selected for an interactive session, “in consideration of the quality of your work”.