François Felix Ingrand

Laboratoire d’Analyse et d’Architecture des Systèmes (LAAS) | LAAS · Department of Robotics (ROB)

Validation and Verification (V&V) of autonomous robotic system software is becoming a critical issue. Among the V&V techniques at our disposal, formal approaches are among the most rigorous and trustworthy ones. Yet, the level of skills and knowledge required to use and deploy formal methods is usually quite high and rare. In this paper, we describ...

Progress in several areas of computer science has been enabled by comfortable and efficient means of experimentation, clear interfaces, and interchangable components, for example using OpenCV for computer vision or ROS for robotics. We describe an extension of the Acumos system towards enabling the above features for general AI applications. Origin...

The design of embedded real-time systems requires specific toolchains to guarantee time constraints and safe behavior. These tools and their artifacts need to be managed in a coherent way all along the design process and need to address timing constraints and execution semantic in a holistic way during the system’s modeling, verification, and imple...

Autonomous robots may one day be allowed to fly or to drive around in large numbers, but this will require their makers and programmers to show that the most critical parts of their software are robust and reliable. Moreover, autonomous robots embed onboard deliberation functions. This is what makes them autonomous but open for new challenges. Ther...

Temporal planning offers numerous advantages when based on an expressive representation. Timelines have been known to provide the required expressiveness but at the cost of search efficiency. We propose here a temporal planner, called FAPE, which supports many of the expressive temporal features of the ANML modeling language without loosing efficie...

Robotics is an interdisciplinary research field leveraging on control theory, mechanical engineering, electronic engineering and computer science. It aims at designing machines able to perceive, move around and interact with their environment in order to perform useful tasks. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science, overlapping...

Autonomous robots may be one day allowed to fly or to drive around in large numbers, but this will require their makers and programmers to show that the most critical parts of their software are robust and reliable. Moreover, autonomous robots embed onboard deliberation functions. This is what makes them autonomous but opens for new challenges. The...

Failure of robotic software may cause catastrophic damages. In order to establish a higher level of trust in robotic systems, formal methods are often proposed. However, their applicability to the functional layer of robots remains limited because of the informal nature of specifications, their complexity and size. In this paper, we formalize the r...

GenoM is an approach to develop robotic software components, which can be controlled, and assembled to build complex applications. Its latest version GenoM3, provides a template mechanism which is versatile enough to deploy components for different middleware without any change in the specification and user code. But this same template mechanism al...

Software constitutes a major part of the development of robotic and autonomous systems and is critical to their successful deployment in our everyday life. Robotic software must thus run and perform as specified. Since most of these systems are used in a hard real-time context, the schedulability of their tasks is a crucial property. In this work,...

Software is an essential part of robotic systems. As robots and autonomous systems are more and more deployed in human environments, we need to use elaborate validation and verification techniques in order to gain a higher level of trust in our systems. This motivates our determination to apply formal verification methods to robotics software. In t...

Robotics is an interdisciplinary research field leveraging on control theory, mechanical engineering, electronic engineering and computer science. It aims at designing machines able to perceive, move around and interact with their environment in order to perform useful tasks. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science, overlapping...

Autonomous robots facing a diversity of open environments and performing a variety of tasks and interactions need explicit deliberation in order to fulfill their missions. Deliberation is meant to endow a robotic system with extended, more adaptable and robust functionalities, as well as reduce its deployment cost.The ambition of this survey is to...

Planning in robotics must be considered jointly with Acting. Planning is an open loop activity which produces a plan, based on action models, the current state of the world and the desired goal state. Acting, on the other hand, is a closed loop on the environment activity (to execute command and perceive the state of the world). These two deliberat...

Planning in robotics must be considered jointly with Act-ing. Planning is an open loop activity which produces a plan, based on action models, the current state of the world and the desired goal state. Acting, on the other hand, is a closed loop on the environment activity (to execute command and per-ceive the state of the world). These two deliber...

Autonomous robots are complex systems that require the interaction and cooperation between numerous heterogeneous software components. In recent times, robots are being increasingly used for complex and safety-critical tasks, such as exploring Mars and assisting/replacing humans. Consequently, robots are becoming critical systems that must meet saf...

Despite a very strong synergy between Robotics and AI at their early beginning, the two fields progressed widely apart in the following decades. However, we are witnessing a revival of interest in the fertile domain of embodied machine intelligence. This is due in particular to the dissemination of more mature techniques from both areas, to more ac...

We have recently started an effort to combine a state of the art tool for developing functional modules of robotic systems (GenoM) with a component based framework for implementing embedded real-time systems (BIP). Unlike some works which study the connection between formal approaches and the highest (decisional) level of the robot software archite...

The functional layer of an autonomous system such as a robot is required to carry out multiple real-time control activities in parallel. These activities are launched by asynchronous calls from clients situated at higher layers, so there is a need for the functional layer to provide built-in protection to ensure that it is robust with respect to re...

A recent concern in marine robotics is to consider the deployment of fleets of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs). Multiple vehicles with heterogeneous capabilities have several advantages over a single vehicle system, and in particular the potential to accomplish tasks faster and better than a single vehic...

In this paper, we propose a new workflow for the design of composite systems. Contrary to existing approaches, which build on traditional techniques for single-component systems, our methodology is incremental in terms of both the design and the verification process. The approach exploits the hierarchy between components and can detect errors at an...

Complex artifacts are designed today from well specified and well modeled components. But most often, the models of these components cannot be composed into a global functional model of the artifact. A significant observation, modeling and identification effort is required to get such a global model, which is needed in order to better understand, c...

The Goal-Oriented Autonomous Controller (GOAC) is the envisaged result of a multi-institutional effort within the on-going Autonomous Controller R&D activ-ity funded by ESA ESTEC. The objective of this effort is to design, build and test a viable on-board controller to demonstrate key concepts in fully autonomous opera-tions for ESA missions. This...

In this paper, we describe a cooperative architecture in which multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) cooperate to locate underwater targets. Each AUV is endowed with a sensor that estimates its distance with respect to targets, and cooperate with others to explore an area with the help of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) that stores the...

Underwater target localization using several AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) is a difficult issue. A systematic and exhaustive coverage strategy is not efficient in term of exploration time: it can be improved by making the AUVs share their information and cooperate to optimize their motions, dealing with the environmental changes and reducin...

The topic of reusable software in robotics is now largely addressed. Components based architectures, where components are independent units that can be reused accross applications, have become more popular. As a consequence, a long list of middlewares and integration tools is available in the community, often in the form of open-source projects. Ho...

With the increasing use of domestic and service robots alongside humans, it is now becoming crucial to be able to verify whether robot-software is safe, dependable, and correct. Indeed, in the near future it may well be necessary for robot-software developers to provide safety certifications guaranteeing, e.g. that a hospital nursebot will not move...

The Multirobot Task Allocation (MRTA) paradigm is widely used in multirobot cooperation schemes, e.g. for observation, surveillance and tracking missions. Market-based approaches have yielded effective distributed solutions for such missions, showing the ability to manage heterogeneous, dynamic and robust robot teams. Two major challenges remain ho...

Autonomous robots are complex systems that require the interaction or cooperation of numerous heterogeneous software components. Nowadays, robots are getting closer to humans and as such are becoming critical systems that must meet safety properties including logical, temporal, and real-time constraints.

Autonomous robots are complex systems that require the interaction or cooperation of numerous heterogeneous software components. Nowadays, robots are getting closer to humans and as such are becoming critical systems that must meet safety properties including logical, temporal, and real-time constraints. ER -

We report on the use of the timed test generator tool TTG as an automatic generator of observers for monitoring purposes for the Dala Robot (LAAS) case study. The starting point is a plan, which is taken to be a high-level specification. This plan is automatically translated into a network of timed automata written in IF language. From the latter a...

Abstract—We,summarize,some,current trends in autonomous robot,software,systems,design,and,point,out,some,of their characteristics, such as the chasm between analytical and com- putational models, and the gap between safety critical and best- effort engineering,practices. We call for a coherent,scientific foundation for autonomous robot software sys...

Autonomous robots are complex systems that require the interaction/cooperation of numerous heterogeneous software components. Nowadays, robots are critical systems and must meet safety properties including in particular temporal and real-time constraints. We present a methodology for modeling and analyzing a robotic system using the BIP component f...

Planning for real world applications, with explicit temporal representation and a robust execution is a very challenging problem. To tackle it, the planning community has proposed a number of original and successful approaches. However, there are other paradigms "outside" the Automated Planning field which may prove to be successful with respect to...

Autonomous robots offer alluring perspectives in numerous application domains: space rovers, satellites, medical assistants, tour guides, etc. However, a severe lack of trust in their dependability greatly reduces their possible usage. In particular, autonomous systems make extensive use of decisional mechanisms that are able to take complex and ad...

To achieve the ever increasing demand for science return, planetary exploration rovers require more autonomy to successfully perform their missions. Indeed, the communication delays are such that teleoperation is unrealistic. Although the current rovers (such as MER) demonstrate a limited navigation autonomy, and mostly rely on ground mission plann...

To achieve the ever increasing demand for science return, planetary exploration rovers require more autonomy to successfully perform their missions. Indeed, the communication delays are such that teleoperation is unrealistic. Although the current rovers (such as MER) demonstrate a limited navigation autonomy, and mostly rely on ground mission plann...

Planners are central to the notion of complex autonomous systems. They provide the flexibility that autonomous systems need to be able to operate unattended in an unknown and dynamically-changing environment. However, they are notoriously hard to validate. This paper reports an investigation of how redundant, diversified models can be used as a com...

The Aurora programme is the European Space Agency programme of planetary exploration focused primarily on Mars. Although the long-term goals of Aurora are uncertain, the early phases of the Aurora programme are based on a number of robotic explorer missions – the first of these is the ExoMars rover mission currently scheduled for launch in 2013 (or...

We present a general concept for the control of a large fleet of autonomous mobile robots which has been developed, implemented and validated through various experiments. The robots demonstrate advanced autonomous features including nonholonomic motion planning, environment modeling, sensor-based obstacle avoidance, and decentralized cooperation sc...

Robust execution of robotic tasks is a difficult problem. In many situations, these tasks involve complex behaviors com- bining different functionalities (e.g. perception, localization, motion planning and motion execution). These behaviors are often programmed with a strong focus on the robustness of the behavior itself, not on the definition of a...

To achieve the ever increasing demand for science re- turns, extraterrestrial exploration rovers require more au- tonomy to successfully perform their missions. Indeed, the communication delays are such that teleoperation is unrealistic. Although the current rovers (such as MER) demonstrate a limited navigation autonomy, and mostly rely on ground m...

There is an increasing need for advanced autonomy in complex embedded real-time systems such as robots, satellites, or UAVs. Still, the growing complexity of the decision capabilities of these systems raises a major problem: how to prove that the system is not going to end in a dangerous state (for itself or for humans)? How to guarantee that the r...

We present the Robel supervision system which is ableto learn from experience robust ways to perform high level tasks(such as "navigate to"). Each possible way to perform the task ismodeled as an Hierarchical Tasks Network (HTN), called modality whose primitives are sensory-motor functions. An HTN planningprocess synthesizes all the consistent moda...

Many autonomous systems such as mobile robots, UAVs or spacecraft, have limited resource capacities and move in dynamic environments. Performing on-board mission plan- ning and execution in such a context requires deliberative capabilities to generate plans achieving mission goals while respecting deadlines and resource constraints, as well as run-...

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a real-time executive for a mobile rover that uses a model-based, declarative approach. The control system is based on the Intelligent Distributed Execution Architecture (IDEA), an approach to planning and execution that provides a unified representational and computational framework for an aut...

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a real-time executive for a mobile rover that uses a model-based, declarative approach. The control system is based on the intelligent distributed execution architecture (IDEA), an approach to planning and execution that provides a unified representational and computational framework for an aut...

This paper presents a new approach to integrate real-time execution control in autonomous systems and how such an approach integrates in their software architecture. The use of decisional autonomy is becoming more widely accepted as a solution to the increasing need to deploy complex systems (robots, satellites, etc.) able to perform nontrivial tas...

This paper presents a study on dedicated software product assurance measures and dependability techniques to support space on-board autonomous functions. An analysis of current standards and techniques in space and other domains, and a survey of software autonomy projects from the point of view of product assurance, dependability and safety are pre...

This paper presents the LAAS architecture for autonomous mobile robots and some recent de-velopments to improve the dependability of the system. In particular, this paper focuses on the role of the Execution Control level of this archi-tecture. This level has a fault protection (safety bag) role with respect to the commands issued to the functional...

This paper presents some recent developments of the LAAS architecture for autonomous mobile robots. In particular, we specify the role of the execution control level of this architecture. This level has a fault protection role with respect to the commands issued by the decisional level, which are transmitted to the real system (through the function...

In the last years we have witnessed an increasing interest in AI systems able to perform reasoning and actions in real-time environments. However, the issue of combining advanced reasoning under real-time constraint remains a challenge. On one side, we have "pre-compiled knowledge" systems, with guaranteed response time, and on the other side, high...

Procedural reasoning systems (PRS) have inspired some works in execution control and supervision, in particular in robotics applications. However, one of the main drawbacks of the PRS is the lack of planning capabilities, even though some PRS execution mechanisms and knowledge representations are related to planning. We propose some extensions to P...