Section: Other Grants and Activities

National initiatives Actions

PEA-DGA SUSIE 2009-12 (continuation of PEA SMAART)

Participants : Olivier Simonin, François Charpillet, Romain Mauffray.

This project relies on results and questions arising from the SMAART project (2006-08). During this project we adapted the EVAP algorithm 6.2.6.1 to the patrol with UAVs, while providing a generic digital pheromone based patrolling simulator (see 5.1.6 ). Concerning sharing authority, we proposed 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.

RNTS PROJECT PréDICA

Participant : Cedric Rose.

The program PréDICA is related to the theme of falls in the elderly, with aspects related to both prediction and detection included. The program is a continuation of the exploratory project PARAChute, which was financed by the RNTS in 2003, which included only those aspects related to fall prediction:

• Definition of the characteristic parameters of a static balance “signature” using the stabilogram analysis produced by a personal scale.

• Analysis of typical gait using a camera without images.

FUI CRISTAL Pôle de compétitivité “Véhicule du Futur”

Participants : Olivier Simonin, Alexis Scheuer, Arnaud Glad, Cherif Smaili, François Charpillet.

  Partners: Lohr Transitec, GEA, VULog, UTBM, MaIA, TRIO, DEDALE, IMARA, Lasmea.

This project is one of the major projects of the Alsace Franche-Comté competitiveness cluster on automotive systems. This Cristal project is leaded by Lohr Industry which has conceived the tram chosen for the city of Clermont-Ferrand(Translohr). Lohr is convinced that this kind of system conceived for transportation of huge number of people can be completed by an individual transportation system made up of small electric vehicles for short downtown movements. One key issue of such a system is platooning (convoy of automatic vehicles) and certification. This project has been funded by FCE (1 M euros). During the year 2008, we studied the Daviet & Parent approach for platooning, showing the limit of the model when the number of vehicles grows. For this purpose we developed a multi-agent simulator 5.1.7 allowing the study of models' parameters and robustness (via simulation of noise on sensors and actuators). We then proposed a high-level controller, which transforms any controller into a safe controller, i.e. avoiding collision, and we proved this property. We presented these results in Cristal Project's annual reports and published an article to ICRA'09 Conference [26] .

ANR TACOS Trustworthy Assembling of Components: frOm requirements to Specification

Participants : Alexis Scheuer, Olivier Simonin, François Charpillet.

TACOS is an ANR-SETIN project started in january 2007 and managed by the DEDALE-Loria team (Pr. J. Souquieres). Other partners are LACL LAS (Paris 12), LAMIH ROI-SID (U. Valenciennes) and LIFC TFC (U. Franche-Comté).

This project proposes a components based approach for the specification of trustworthy systems. It consists in requirement expression to formal specification, by using or adapting existing tools. The applicative domain is the transport, by focusing on distributed and embedded systems that have functional and non-functional properties relating to time and availability contraints. Maia is involved in the definition of the case-study, which consists in a platoon of autonomous vehicules. In order to study such systems we defined in collaboration with DEDALE a generic B expression of the Influence/Reaction model, that was proposed by Ferber & Muller in 1996. The I/R model allows to clearly represent dynamics in situated multi-agent systems. Our proposition extends the approach to its formal writting and the ability to prove some properties by using B provers. We illustrated this framework by studying the bio-inspired platooning model proposed by Maia. This work is detailled in internal report INRIA-00173876 and is submitted to an international journal. We now work on improving the framework, involving simulation and study of the properties of the system.

FD2S (Fusion de Données pour la Supervision d?un Système complexe : application aux systèmes de transport guidés) project funded by GIS 3SGS(Surveillance, sûreté et sécurité des grands systèmes)

Participants : Maan Badaoui, Cherif Smaili, François Charpillet.

This project proposes to adress localisation of platoon of vehicules as a data fusion problem. This year we proposed multi-sensor fusion method for a high performance navigation system. This method is designed to support real-time navigational features. At the heart of the proposed method is Bayesian Network which fuses data from several positioning sensors. The data fusion approach provides high quality, high integrity data to both the navigation systems and also for the control, and is consequently safety critical. Managing multi-hypotheses is a useful strategy to treat ambiguity situation induced by sensors uncertainty or failure. The multi-sensor fusion and multi-modal estimation are realized using hybrid Bayesian network (HBN). The multi-modal estimation is a way which we propose in this paper to manage multi-hypothesis for the localisation task in order to take into account the event of a sensors or an information sources imprecision or failure. Experimental results, using data from Anti-lock Braking System (ABS) sensors, a Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) receiver and an accurate digital roadmap, illustrate the performances of the proposed approach, especially in ambiguous situations.

ANR project MAPS - 2008/2010

Participant : Alain Dutech.

Rooted at the crossroad of neuroscience and computer neuroscience, this project aims at increasing our understanding of the brain. By studying, modeling and simulating the behavior of orienting the gaze from different points of view (neuroscience, behavior psychology and artificial intelligence), we plan to increase our understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of cortical maps. MAIA is more particularly involved in using reinforcement learning in a high level simulation to validate some functional concepts and then in trying to formulate biologically plausible low-level mecanism that could support the reinforcement learning paradigm.

Partners : Loria-INRIA, Nancy (Maia and Cortex); UMR Mouvement et Perception, Marseille; Institut de Neurosciences Cognitives de la Méditerranée (INCM)-CNRS, Marseilles; Laboratoire d'Informatique en Images et Systèmes d'information (LIRIS), Lyon.

The INRIA ARC AMYBIA

Participants : Nazim Fatès, Nikolaos Vlassopoulos.

The project gathers researchers from the MAIA team (Nazim Fatès, Nikolaos Vlassopoulos), the CORTEX team (Bernard Girau), the ALCHEMY team (Hugues Berry). It began in January 2008 and goes on until teh end of December 2009. The context of our collaboration is the definition of innovative schemes of decentralised and massively distributed computing. We aim at contributing to this at three levels:

• At the modeling level, we think that biology provides us with complex and efficient models of such massively distributed behaviours. We start our study by addressing the decentralised gathering problem with the help of an original model of aggregation based on the behaviour of social amoebae.

• At the simulation level, our research mainly relies on achieving large scale simulations and on obtaining large statistical samples. Mastering these simulations is a major scientific issue, especially considering the imposed constraints: distributed computations, parsimonious computing time and memory requirements. Furthermore its raises further problems, such as: how to handle asynchronism, randomness and statistical analysis?

• At the hardware level, the challenge is to constantly confront our models with the actual constraints of a true practice of distributed computing. The main idea is to consider the hardware as a kind of sanity check. Hence, we intend to implement and validate our distributed models on massively parallel computing devices. In return, we expect that the analysis of the scientific issues raised by these implementations will influence the definition of the models themselves.

The work related to this issue was presented at the “journées ARC” in Bordeaux, see:

http://webloria.loria.fr/~fates/Amybia/project.html

COMAC

Participants : Mauricio Araya, Marie Tonnelier, Vincent Thomas, Olivier Buffet, François Charpillet.

Laurent Bougrain (CORTEX team, LORIA) is an external collaborator.

The COMAC(COMAC = contrôle optimisé multi-techniques des aérostructures composites / optimised multi-technique control of composite aeronautic parts) project is part of the Materalia competitive cluster. The main objective of the project is to develop diagnosis tools for the low cost identification of defaults in aeronautics parts made of composite materials.

In collaboration with Laurent Bougrain, one of our objectives is to propose a software toolbox for computer-aided diagnosis in this context. The current project is a system relying on expert knowledge taking the form of a database of labelled images.

In the MAIA team, our research effort will focus more precisely on information gathering problems involving active sensors, i.e. an intelligent system which has to select the observations to perform (which sensor, where, at which resolution). Mauricio Araya has recently started a PhD on this precise topic of Active Sensing (Section  6.1.2 ).

DOPEC

Participants : Olivier Buffet, François Charpillet.

The DOPEC project is a DGA PEA (upstream studies project) on the optimization of the use of sensor systems. In collaboration with EADS (project leader) and the LAAS, we work on autonomous sequential decision making problems. We are more particularly interested, on the one hand, in multi-agent problems and, on the other hand, in taking uncertainties into account.

PEPS - Vers une formalisation des théories des organisations

Participants : Christine Bourjot, Vincent Chevrier, Vincent Thomas.

The main challenge of this STI2 PEPS (Projets Exploratoires Pluridisciplinaires) is to gather researchers from several fields (sociologist, specialist of theory of organization and computer scientists) to collaborate on the understanding and the modelling of social organizations.

Whereas an important number of collaborations has been undertaken between computer scientists and ethologists to understand and model biological collective phenomena, few similar works have been conducted in sociology. The main objective of this STI2 PEPS (Projets Exploratoires Pluridisciplinaires) proposed by Pascal Roggéro (Université Toulouse 1) and Christophe Sibertin-Blanc (IRIT) is to gather multi-agent community and researchers from sociology (sociologists, specialists of theory of organization) to collaborate on the understanding and the modeling of social organizations.

As an exploratory project, this project is very prospective. It focuses on presenting organization theories and multi-agent models that could be suited for social systems multi-agent modeling. This project constitutes a first step to analyse the feasibility of a research programme devoted to social organization modeling.

GET Gouvernance Enactive des Systèmes de Transports - IXXI

Participant : Vincent Chevrier.

This project is funded by the "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.

The aim of the project is the governance of transportation systems from the enactive perspective. This year, we focused on the specification of a participative simulator which aims at proposing means for a regulator to interact with a simulated transportation systems.

ANR project “Cartomatic” (2009-12)

Participants : Olivier Simonin, François Charpillet, Antoine Bautin.

This project is funded by the “Agence Nationale de la Recherche”. It was selected for the Robotic Challenge “Carotte”, ie. ”CArtographie par ROboT d'un TErritoire”, in the “Contenus et Interactions” program. The consortium is composed of researchers from LISA Laboratory (P. Lucidarme is the coordinator of the project), MAIA team and Wany Robotics. This project concerns the mapping of an indoor structured but unknown environment, and the localisation 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. Antoine Bautin has recently started a PhD on the topic of multi-robot deployment and mapping (Section  6.2.7 ).

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 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 aim at developping a new technological support based on an interactive table to allow robots to read and write information in the environment (e.g. digital pheromones), see Section  6.2.7 . Nicolas Beaufort was recently hired as an INRIA IJD engineer to developp the required functions on the interactive table and the robots.