Presentation

Overview

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.

Scientific objectives

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.

Research directions

The research program of ACENTAURI will be decomposed in the following three research axes:

  • Axis A: “Augmented spatio-temporal perception of complex environments”. The long-term objective of this research axis is to build accurate and composite models of large-scale environments that mix metric, topological and semantic information. Ensuring the consistency of these various representations during the robot exploration and merging/sharing observations acquired from different viewpoints by several collaborative robots or sensors attached to the infrastructure, are very difficult problems. This is particularly true when different sensing modalities are involved and when the environments are time-varying. A recent trend in Simultaneous Localization And Mapping is to augment low-level maps with semantic interpretation of their content. Indeed, the semantic level of abstraction is the key element that will allow us to build the robot’s environmental awareness (see Axis B). For example, the so-called semantic maps have already been used in mobile robot navigation, to improve path planning methods, mainly by providing the robot with the ability to deal with human-understandable targets. New studies to derive efficient algorithms for manipulating the hybrid representations (merging, sharing, updating, filtering) while preserving their consistency are needed for long-term navigation.

  • Axis B: “Situation awareness for decision and planning”. The long-term objective of this research axis is to design and develop a decision-making module that is able to (i) plan the mission of the robots (global planning), (ii) generate the sub-tasks (local objectives) necessary to accomplish the mission based on Situation Awareness and (iii) plan the robot paths and/or sets of actions to accomplish each subtask (local planning). Since we have to face uncertainties, the decision module must be able to react efficiently in real-time based on the available sensor information (on-board or attached to an IoT infrastructure) in order to guarantee the safety of humans and things. For some tasks, it is necessary to coordinate a multi-robots system (centralized strategy), while for other each robot evolves independently with its own decentralized strategy. In this context, Situation Awareness is at the heart of an autonomous system in order to feed the decision-making process, but also can be seen as a way to evaluate the performance of the global process of perception and interpretation in order to build a safe autonomous system. Situation Awareness is generally divided into three parts: perception of the elements in the environment (see Axis A), comprehension of the situation, and projection of future states (prediction and planning). When planning the mission of the robot, the decision-making module will first assume that the configuration of the multi-robot system is known in advance, for example one robot on the ground and two robots on the air. However, in our long-term objectives, the number of robots and their configurations may evolve according to the application objectives to be achieved, particularly in terms of performance, but also to take into account the dynamic evolution of the environment.

  • Axis C: “Advanced multi-sensor control of autonomous multi-robot systems”. The long-term objective of this research axis is to design multi-sensor (on-board or attached to an IoT infrastructure) based control of potentially multi-robots systems for tasks where the robots must navigate into a complex dynamic environment including the presence of humans. This implies that the controller design must explicitly deal not only with uncertainties and inaccuracies in the models of the environment and of the sensors, but also to consider constraints to deal with unexpected human behavior. To deal with uncertainties and inaccuracies in the model, two strategies will be investigated. The first strategy is to use Stochastic Control techniques that assume known probability distribution on the uncertainties. The second strategy is to use system identification and reinforcement learning techniques to deal with differences between the models and the real systems. To deal with unexpected human behavior, we will investigate Stochastic Model Predictive Control (MPC) techniques and Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control techniques in order to anticipate future events and take optimal control actions accordingly. A particular emphasis will be given to the theoretical analysis (observability, controllability, stability and robustness) of the control laws.

Keywords: Autonomous robotics, Modelling, Perception, Control, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Human-Robot Interaction, Numerical Analysis, Quantum computing

Background:

The ACENTAURI team is the follow-up of CHORALE team (headed by Philippe Martinet from 2018 to 2020) which takes its roots from the LAGADIC Sophia Antipolis team (headed by Patrick Rives from 2012 to 2017) and the EVOLUTION team (headed by Ezio Malis from 2009 to 2011). The main scientific focuses were Automatic Control, Visual servoing, Computer Vision, Image Processing, Nonlinear Control, Robotics, SLAM and Deep Learning.

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