Symbiotic interactions between robots and the real world

This work package (WP) aims to develop a continuum of perception and actions that can perform both reflexive actions and higher-level social interactions in order to provide to user's safety and comfort in the daily use of robots. It is intrinsically linked to the first three WP, because:

1. It is a source of proposal for new paradigms for the design (WP1), perception (WP2), decision/control (WP3) of robotic systems, drawing inspiration from work on humans and animals;
2. Transversal to each WP in order to accompany robotic approaches by inspiration from living models and to create a continuum between the first three WP of the project. Indeed, designing and developing robotic systems in the global ecosystem of the real environment in a symbiotic way, allows us to predict how robots will be integrated by the global ecosystem of humans.

WP4 is structured around 2 scientific challenges: (i) symbiotic interactions of the robots with their physical environment and (ii) advanced symbiotic interactions.

The focus of this initiative is to design novel methods for more intuitive interaction between the robot and its physical environment. Interactions of a robot with a real environment remain a key challenge of the current robots and the design of robots that could adapt to the physical properties of their environment represents a promising pathway for future robots. For that purpose, such robots should be able to “understand” their environment and then conform their behavior. In the meanwhile, the approaches that will be designed should meet strong robustness and/or interactivity criteria to be used in several situations. To unlock this true cooperation with the real world, robots must be endowed with perception and estimation capabilities that will allow them to know accurately, and in real time, the state of their human partner. This gathering of information should feed adaptable control laws that will adjust to any situation while being personalized to each partner. Consequently, the resulting interactions will lead to more relevant and acceptable physical interactions.

Regarding advanced symbiotic interactions, it is a multidisciplinary initiative aiming at exploring different fields of research allowing the development of advanced symbiotic interactions between humans and robots, as well as robots with living organisms and the environment. The research work done by a multidisciplinary team will be privileged in order to identify a set of experiences to evaluate several social interactions between humans and different robotic platforms. In fact, this set of experiments will be based on behavioral protocols, chosen according to their scientific interests, and also on the know-how of MSTIC roboticists to customize their platforms and add specific sensors and actuators to their robotic platforms. This challenge is strongly related to PhD6 and WP1.