CHROMA : Cooperative and Human-aware Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments

CHROMA is an Inria team-project, common with INSA Lyon CITI lab, co-situated in Grenoble (Montbonnot) and Lyon. The overall objective of Chroma is to address fundamental and open issues that lie at the intersection of the emerging research fields called “Human Centered Robotics” and “Multi-Robot Systems (MRS)”. Our goal is to design algorithms and develop models allowing mobile robots to navigate and operate in dynamic and human-populated environments. Chroma is involved in all decision aspects pertaining to (multi)robot navigation tasks, including perception and motion-planning. Our approach for addressing this challenge is to bring together probabilistic methods, planning techniques and multi-agent decision models. This is done in cooperation with other disciplines such as psycho-sociologists for the purpose of taking into account human models. Two main research themes of robotic navigation are addressed : i) Perception and situation awarness in human-populated environment, by focusing on bayesian perception and sensor fusion ii) Scaling-up single and multi-robot motion-planning, by combining uncertainty modeling, decentralized (swarm) models and multi-agent sequential decision making. The Chroma team is also concerned with applications and transfer of the scientific results. We work with industrial and start-up partners. Our main application domains concern autonomous vehicle driving (with Renault, Toyota, Volvo), aerial robots for surveillance tasks and services robotics.