PEPR O2R
Over the past few decades, robotics has been a source of innovation for production, logistics, intervention, exploration, and healthcare systems.
However, despite significant technological advances, questions and issues remain regarding the integration of robots into our lives and society.
Their design and development, based on engineering techniques that emerged during the industrial revolution, no longer always meet the needs raised by ever-changing uses. They remain largely disconnected from new societal challenges related to humans and the environment.
The Robotics for society research program aims to implement socially adapted robotics in terms of its principles, behavior, performance, and uses, and open to the complexity of societal challenges.
This exploration research program will be based on a multidisciplinary approach integrating the social sciences and humanities, digital sciences, and engineering sciences. By integrating the contributions of these different disciplines, we will redefine methodologies, action and interaction behaviors, cognitive functions, and learning abilities, breaking with current robotic technologies and their limitations.
The Robotics for society research program aims to initiate a transformation in robotics to create a new generation of robots capable of fluid and natural interactions with users, social adaptation in their interactions, and accompanying technological transitions in societies by producing tailored, responsive, and reliable services for citizens. To achieve these objectives, the research program offers a dedicated platform for the creation of organic robots, bringing together the robotics and social sciences communities. This interdisciplinary approach aims to develop a new generation of robots that serve humanity and to stimulate, with a view to the future, a more comprehensive reflection on the relationship between robotics and society. Rethinking uses, the relationship between robotics and society, and more generally, technologies and societies, through a reflective approach is at the heart of the program.
Three scientific challenges are addressed in this project through a multidisciplinary approach
1. Identify the determinants of robots’ social adaptation and their links to robot behavior and design.
2. Create integrated hardware and software architectures for robots, enabling embodied intelligence and robustness in the face of the complexity of their operating and usage environments.
3. Endow robots with the ability to interact smoothly with humans.
Robotics has numerous economic, environmental, and societal impacts.
The research program teams wish to focus their short-term efforts on the field of health and, more generally, on personal assistance.
Gradually, and in collaboration with the social sciences, they will open up their use cases to other areas of application that remain to be defined during the program and which may cover all fields. The research program will be organized around challenges through support for targeted research projects and teams, open and multidisciplinary research projects, with a particular focus on collaboration between robotics and the humanities and social sciences.
Shared disruptive equipment will also be implemented in order to integrate all of the scientific concepts mentioned and to capitalize on and promote the results obtained. The budget will be used to fund theses, post-docs, hardware and software platform engineers, the recruitment of young researchers, and transfer activities. All data, prototypes, and software developed as part of the Robotics for society research program will be openly disseminated, with a focus on open source.
Ecosystem of the PEPR O2R
