Robea
An Interdisciplinary National Program in Robotics

The CNRS has recently launched a wide and ambitious national program on Robotics, called "Robotique et Entités Artificielles" (Robea) . This interdisciplinary program covers the main research areas of the field, in Computer Science, Signal processing and Control theory. It also concerns other areas in engineering, in life sciences, in cognitive sciences and in social sciences and humanities.

The Robea program views robotics as the interdisciplinary study, design and integration of sensory-motor and cognitive functions. It is concerned with the integration of these functions within machines that are able to achieve autonomously various tasks in open and changing environments, machines that are able to interact with humans and other machines and able to improve their behavior through learning. Most issues concerned with the study and integration of perception-decision-action functions remain relevant and of interest to Robea when these cognitive functions are not embodied within a single machine but distributed over a network of sensors, of actuators, of processing and communication equipments.

Consequently the program covers all areas of robotics in a broad sense, and in particular through the issues of their multidisciplinary integration. These are for example:

• Problems for consistent modeling of the environment through multiple heterogeneous representations, e.g., numerical grids, geometrical, topological, functional and semantic maps (landmarks, objects of various types, contexts, situations, etc.);
• Problems of perception and motion: visual servoing, robust localization and control with multiple modalities and redundant exteroceptive sensors;
• Problems of active perception and sensory planning: choice of sensors, of sensing and processing modalities, viewpoint selection, information gathering strategies for environment exploration or modeling, for scene interpretation, etc.;
• Problems of planning and decision making, online, while acting, sensing, communicating and coordinating activities in a distributed interaction; other relevant issues here are those of the architecture of a complex machine, its organization, its bounded rationality, and issues of rational agents in informational systems;
• Problems of learning sensory-motor functions, procedures, rules and concepts, and problems of actively planning and achieving actions in order to learn.

In addition to the main disciplines in Information Sciences and Technologies, Robea also covers the following areas:

• Mechanics and material engineering: design of specific actuators, new materials for artificial muscles, mechanical properties of specific systems (flexible, with mechanical loops) or components (legs, arms, hands), bio-mechanical problems in tele-operation, simulation, virtual reality;
• Neurosciences: interaction between different approaches to the study and modeling of sensory-motor and cognitive functions;
• Humanities and social sciences: particularly with respect to the problems of Human-robot interactions through different modalities, for the cooperation, the interactive problem solving and task carrying, and in the study of collective behavior;
• Cognitive sciences: through interdisciplinary approaches involving various representations and experiments for the study of natural cognition, decision making, learning and social behavior, this covers for example the study of emerging properties of individual or collective behavior within artificial life and evolution-based approaches;
• Medical sciences for the development through close interdisciplinary collaborations of new robotics aided techniques of clinical inspection, monitoring and surgery.

The Robea program supports collaborative research projects from academic laboratories in France, affiliated to CNRS, or to Universities and other public research institutions. INRIA is associated to the program and contribute to its funding. Several other institutes such as ONERA, CEA, INSERM or IFREMER have also expressed an interest in the program. The program is open to collaborations with the industry and with foreign partners. The first call of the program has received 44 submitted projects. Five submissions received a limited one year funding for preparing a more advanced project, while ten proposals got funded for 2 to 3 years and started during Fall 2001.

Another call for proposals has been issued in 2002 focused on 12 topics not yet covered by actual Robea projects.

In October 2002, in Toulouse, Robea has organized its first conference where the Robea projects and other European projects have been invited to present their results.