ACENTAURI

The goal of ACENTAURI is to study and develop intelligent, autonomous and mobile robots that collaborate between them to achieve challenging tasks in dynamic environments. The team focuses on perception, decision and control problems for multi-robot collaboration by proposing an original hybrid model-driven / data driven approach to artificial intelligence and by studying efficient algorithms. The team focuses on robotic applications like environment monitoring and transportation of people and goods. In these applications, several robots will share multi-sensor information eventually coming from infrastructure. The team will demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches on real robotic systems like cars AGVs and UAVs together with industrial partners.

The scientific objectives that we want to achieve are to develop:

• robots that are able to perceive in real-time through their sensors unstructured and changing environments (in space and time) and are able to build large scale semantic representations taking into account the uncertainty of interpretation and the incompleteness of perception.The main scientific bottlenecks are (i) how to exceed purely geometric maps to have semantic understanding of the scene and (ii) how to share these representations between robots having different sensomotoric capabilities so that they can possibly collaborate together to perform a common task.

• autonomous robots in the sense that they must be able to accomplish complex tasks by taking high-level cognitive-based decisions without human intervention. The robots evolve in an environment possibly populated by humans, possibly in collaboration with other robots or communicating with infrastructure (collaborative perception). The main scientific bottlenecks are (i) how to anticipate unexpected situations created by unpredictable human behavior using the collaborative perception of robots and infrastructure and (ii) how to design robust sensor-based control law to ensure robot integrity and human safety.

• intelligent robots in the sense that they must (i) decide their actions in real-time on the basis of the semantic interpretation of the state of the environment and their own state (situation awareness), (ii) manage uncertainty both on sensor, control and dynamic environment (iii) predict in real-time the future states of the environment taking into account their security and human safety, (iv) acquire new capacities and skills, or refine existing skills through learning mechanisms.

• efficient algorithms able to process large amount of data and solve hard problems both in robotic perception, learning, decision and control. The main scientific bottlenecks are (i) how to design new efficient algorithms to reduce the processing time with ordinary computers and (ii) how to design new quantum algorithms to reduce the computational complexity in order to solve problems that are not possible in reasonable time with ordinary computers.