Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

ANR

• The GeoBot FUI project (https://geobot.fr/) is one of the most innovative, challenging and fun projects around wireless localization in the world today. It applies true innovation to a real-world problem, with a clear target application (and customer) in mind. The GeoBot partners are building a small robot (think of a matchbox-sized RC car) that will be inserted into a gas pipe, and move around it to map the location of the different underground pipes. Such mapping is necessary to prevent gas-related accidents, for example during construction. At the end of the project, this solution will be commercialized and used to map the network of gas pipe in France, before being used in worldwide. Each partner is in charge of a different aspect of the problem: robotics, analysis of the inertial data, visualization, etc. Inria is in charge of the wireless part. We will be equipping the robot with a wireless chip(set) in order to (1) communicate with the robot as it moves about in the pipes while standing on the surface, and (2)  discover the relative location of the robot w.r.t. a person on the surface. Inria is evaluating different wireless technologies, benchmarking around ranging accuracy and capabilities to communicate. We start from off-the-shelf kits from different vendors and build a custom board, benchmark it, and integrate it with the other partners of the project.

Other collaborations

• EVA has a collaboration with Orange Labs. Thomas Watteyne supervises the PhD of Mina Rady, which happens under a CIFRE agreement with Orange Labs.

• EVA has a collaboration with Vedecom. Paul Muhlethaler supervises Fouzi Boukhalfa's PhD funded by Vedecom. This PhD aims at studying low latency and high reliability vehicle-to-vehicle communication to improve roads safety.

• EVA has an ongoing collaboration with SODEAL company, which exploits the Cap d'Agde marina, as part of the SmartMarina project.