Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

The project-team activity is focused on the study of mobile robotic systems destined to accomplish complex tasks involving strong interactions with the system's environment. The underlying spectrum of research is vast due to the variety of devices amenable to automatization ( ground, underwater and aerial vehicles...), of environments in which these devices are vowed to operate (structured/natural, known/unknown, static/dynamic...), and of applications for which they have been designed (assistance to handicapped people, environmental monitoring, rescue deployment after natural disasters, observation and tactical support...).

A fundamental issue in autonomous mobile robotics is to build consistent representations of the environment that can be used to trigger and execute the robot's actions. In its broadest sense, perception requires detecting, recognizing, and localizing elements of the environment, given the limited sensing and computational resources of the robot. The performance of a mobile robotic system crucially depends on its ability to process sensory data in order to achieve these objectives in real-time. Perception is a fundamental issue for both the implementation of reactive behaviors (based on feedback control loops) and the construction of the representations which are used at the task level. Among the sensory modalities, artificial vision and range finder are of particular importance and interest due to their availability and extended range of applicability. They are used for the perception and modeling of the robot's environment, and also for the control of the robot itself. Sensor-based control refers to the methods and techniques dedicated to the use of sensor data and information in automatic control loops. Its mastering is essential to the development of many (existing and future) robotic applications and a corner-stone of the research on autonomous robotics.

Most tasks performed by robots rely on the control of their displacements. Research on robot motion control largely stems from the fact that the equations relating the actuators outputs to the displacements of the robot's constitutive bodies are nonlinear. The extent of the difficulties induced by nonlinearity varies from one type of mechanism to another. Whereas the control of classical holonomic manipulator arms has been addressed very early by roboticists, and may now be considered as a well investigated issue, studies on the control of nonholonomic mobile robots are more recent. They also involve more sophisticated control techniques whose development participates in the extension of Control Theory. Another source of difficulty is underactuation, i.e. when the number of independent means of actuation is smaller than the number of degrees of freedom of the robotic mechanism. Most marine and aerial vehicles are underactuated. A particularly challenging case is when underactuation renders all classical control techniques, either linear or nonlinear, inoperative because it yields a system of linearized motion equations which, unlike the original nonlinear system, is not controllable. Such systems are sometimes called critical. Research in this area of automatic control is still largely open.

ARobAS genuinely tries to balance and confront theoretical developments and application-oriented challenges. In this respect, validation and testing on physical systems is essential, not only as a means to bring together all aspects of the research done in ARobAS –and thus maintain the coherence and unity of the project-team–, but also to understand the core of the problems on which research efforts should focus in priority. To this aim, a significant part of our resources is devoted to the development of experimentation facilities that are proper to the project and constitute an experimental workbench for the research done in the project. In parallel, we try to develop other means of experimentation in partnership research programs. Inside Inria with other EPIs like, for example, Coprin which develops a robotized wheeled walking aid (ANG Assistive Navigation Guide ) in the context of the Inria Large Scale Initiative PAL Personally Assisted Living . Outside Inria with others partners like for example with the Ifremer concerning underwater robotics, and with the CenPRA of Campinas (Brazil), I.S.T. of Lisboa (Portugal), and Bertin Tech. Inc. for the control of unmanned aerial vehicles (blimps and drones).