SAPHARI

Established in 1968, Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes (LAAS) is a Research Unit of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). It is associated with six university institutions in Toulouse: Toulouse I (Capitole), Toulouse II (Mirail), Toulouse III (Université Paul Sabatier), INSA, ISAE and INP. CNRS-LAAS has a permanent staff of over 320, together with (on average) 260 doctorate students. Research at CNRS-LAAS covers Automatic Control, Computer Science and Engineering, and Microelectronics. The Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Department, the largest in France (25 staff, 50 PhD students, and 7 postdocs), is active in research on intelligent and autonomous robotic systems. The team involved in this proposal is composed of members from the Robotics and Interactions group (RIS) and from the Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance group (TSF).

Key researchers

Rachid ALAMI (http://homepages.laas.fr/rachid) is Senior Scientist at CNRS-LAAS. He is currently the head of the Robotocs and Artificial Intelligence Department at CNRS-LAAS.  He received an engineer diploma in computer science in 1978 from ENSEEIHT, a Ph.D in Robotics in 1983 from the University Paul Sabatier and a Habilitation HDR in 1996. He contributed and took important responsibilities in several national, European and international research and/or collaborative projects (EUREKA: FAMOS, AMR and I-ARES projects; ESPRIT: MARTHA, PROMotion, ECLA; IST FP6: COMETS, COGNIRON, URUS; IST FP7: CHRIS; France: ARA, VAP-RISP for planetary rovers, PROMIP, ANR projects). His main research contributions fall in the fields of robot architectures, task and motion planning, multi-robot cooperation, and human-robot interaction.

Thierry SIMÉON (http://homepages.laas.fr/nic/WebNic) is Senior Scientist at CNRS-LAAS. After graduating from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (1985), he received the Ph.D. degree in Robotics and the Habilitation degree from the University Paul Sabatier of Toulouse in 1989 and 1999, respectively. He spent a postdoctoral year at University of Pennsylvania, PA before to join CNRS-LAAS in 1990. His research interests include algorithmic motion planning and manipulation planning. He has published more than 90 papers in international journals and conferences. He participated to several European projects: the Esprit 3 BRA project PROMotion (Planning RObot Motion), the Eureka project I-ARES (Rover for Planetary Exploration), the Esprit 4 LTR project Molog (Motion for Logistics) that he coordinated, and from 2003 to 2006 the IST FP5 project Movie (Motion in Virtual Environments) as site leader. He is one of the founding partners of Kineo CAM, a spin-off company from LAAS, awarded in 2005 with the IEEE-IFR innovation price. His recent research focuses on investigating the application of robot motion planning algorithms to computational structural biology. In parallel, he continues to contribute to robot motion and manipulation planning in the frame of the recent PHRIENDS IST FP6 and Dexmart FP7 European projects. 

David POWELL (http://homepages.laas.fr/dpowell) is Senior Scientist in the Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance Group at CNRS-LAAS. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Southampton, England in 1972, a Specialty Doctorate degree from the Toulouse Paul Sabatier University in 1975, and his Docteur ès-Sciences degree from the Toulouse National Polytechnic Institute in 1981. He has authored or co-authored 3 books, 136 papers and 19 book chapters, managed several national and European research contracts, and acted as a consultant for companies in France and for the European Commission. His research interests include dependability in the face of accidental faults and malicious intrusion, fault-tolerant distributed systems, and dependability assessment. His current focus is mobile computing and autonomous robot systems. He was the Scientific Director of the Delta-4 FP3 Esprit project and the Scientific Advisor of the GUARDS FP4 Esprit project. He served as program chair of the first European Dependable Computing Conference (Berlin, Germany, 1994), program co-chair of the 26th IEEE Symposium on Fault Tolerant Computing (Sendai, Japan, 1996) and guest editor of a special section of Communications of the ACM devoted to group communication (April 1996). Dr. Powell is a member of IEEE, ACM, SEE and the IFIP 10.4 working group on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance.

Jeremie GUIOCHET (http://homepages.laas.fr/guiochet) is Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Toulouse III, Université Paul Sabatier (UPS), which is a third party of CNRS-LAAS (see 2.3.13.2), in France. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 2003 from INSA Toulouse where he worked on risk management and UML notation applied to the development of a medical robot. He joined the Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance group at CNRS-LAAS in 2004 and start working on critical autonomous systems. He was responsible for several tasks in the PHRIENDS project and work package leader in the MIRAS project (the latter is a national project in the area of medical robotics). Dr. Guiochet also participated in the network ResIST (Resilience for Survivability in IST) and is a member of the IARP/IEEE-RAS WG on Technical Challenges for Dependable Robots in Human Environments.