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French National Robotics platform - ROBOTEX

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French National Robotics platform - ROBOTEX

Context and challenges

Robotics has become an integral part of important societal issues like healthcare, environment, aerospace and transportation, military and civil security, and energy production. Consequently, robotics research must cope with growing demands, both societal and economic, leading to new scientific and interdisciplinary research problems. Robotics research is based on the integration of material and software supported by the most recent technologies in programming, computing, sensing and actuators. The quality of the research partly depends on the accumulated knowledge on continuously evolving experimental systems and setups. A key factor for the development of robotics research is the requirement of appropriate experimental facilities to validate theoretical and methodological results. In this context, a strong network of competitive experimental platforms becomes absolutely decisive to keep with the international competition. An ambitious research project in this field is necessary to maintain the French robotics research at the competitive world level.

Objectives

robotex illustration 2

The goal of the ROBOTEX project is to build a coherent infrastructure of technical equipments as well as scientific and technological expertise in order to:
• Promote scientific and technological collaborations between different research laboratories and research projects with the objective of fostering the co-operation between academic research teams, companies and robotic technologies users (translational research), and providing durable and reusable expertise and know–how;
• Facilitate the purchase of large-scale or expensive equipments and provide an access to this equipment as well as to the technological facilities and expertise;
• Increase the visibility of the French robotics academic research and its international impact. It particularly concerns the strengthening of its European scientific leadership, as well as the increase of collaborative works with leading European countries, like Germany, Italy, Switzerland, … and the dynamization of international bilateral relationships with countries like, Japan, Korea, United States, …
• Stimulate the competitiveness and the development of French companies.

Content

The experimental platforms of the ROBOTEX national network mostly belong to joint CNRS-university laboratories with strong research and developments in robotics and with material and human resources guaranteeing an access and optimal exploitation of the platforms. This national network links together most of the leading academic robotics research teams of France. It is structured into five scientific themes:
• Production Robotics,
• Mobile Robotics,
• Medical Robotics,
• Micro-Nanorobotics,
• Humanoid Robotics and Natural Interactions.

Micronanorobotics platform

nano robotics platform

FEMTO-ST institute is the responsible of the Micro-Nanorobotics platform which includes two institute: ISIR, Paris and FEMTO-ST
The Micro-Nanorobotics platform focuses on robotic interaction with objects whose size is in a “no man’s land”, i.e. from 100nm to 10µm, between nanotechnologies (1nm-100nm) and microtechnologies (10µm-1mm). The exploration of this new scientific paradigm for robotics requires adapted equipment to strictly control the environment using high vacuum chamber which integrates nanopositionning stages, vision system (Scanning Electron Microscopes, “SEM”) and characterization tools (force sensors). Such equipment adapted to the development of research in nanorobotics will be new in France. It will be a powerful force for the development of nanorobotics and will represent an excellent opportunity to interact with potential external users, industrial (e.g. in the nanotechnology or biotechnology fields) and academia (e.g. in material science). A special attention will be paid to the complementarity of these tools with other equipments (high vacuum or specific gas) in order to be able to create unique clusters.





Contact
Michaël Gauthier
michael.gauthier@femto-st.fr

version : en ⇒ version : fr