Nuclear Emergency Robots from Europe

While Japan is renowned for its cutting edge robotics technology the world is surprised and concerned to  watch human firefighters and plant workers at the high risk Fukushima site north of Tokyo. Why aren't  remote controlled robots and unmanned vehicles cooling the damaged reactors? When asked a science ministry official said a robot used to detect radiation levels is at the Fukushima site,  but nuclear safety agency JNES official Hidehiko Nishiyama said: "We have no reports of any robots being used."

IAEA in Search of Nuclear Emergency Robots
One week after the earthquake and nuclear power plant disaster IAEA has sent a request to countries asking for "robots and unmanned vehicles capable of operating in highly radioactive “ as that of Fukushima. According to the German media reports Japan has asked Germany for remote controlled robots for operations at Fukushima 1. According to Christoph Unger, President of German Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK), an inquiry can be send out to the federal states to ask who can supply such robots as soon as specifications have been arrived from Japan. Two organizations that might help are German KHG and French Group INTRA.

KHG - German Nuclear Emergency Team Germany 

Credit: KHG

The operators of nuclear power plants in the Federal Republic of Germany have taken technical and personnel precautions to stabilize a plant following an accident or breakdown, to analyse the cause and to eliminate the resultant effects. Part of this emergency programme has been placed in the hands of our organisation. The KHG Kerntechnische Hilfsdienste GmbH (Nuclear Technology Support Services) was founded in 1977 by the companies operating nuclear power plants in Germany, together with the fuel cycle industry and major research centres. KHG has a range of vehicles extending from a 22 ton radio-controlled excavator, to small radio-controlled inspection vehicle.


Group INTRA - Nuclear Emergency Team France 
In France the Groupe INTRA, created in 1988, two years after the accident of Chernobyl, by the three French nuclear operators EDF, CEA and AREVA(COGEMA), has developed, operate and maintain a fleet of specific remote-controlled equipment, able to intervene instead of human beings, in the case of an accident in one of its members’ nuclear site. INTRA has also developed expertise of remote intervention, by listing and capitalizing on the experience of interventions carried out within companies or anywhere else, in the case of incident, exceptional maintenance or cleaning and/or decommissioning.

Credit: Groupe INTRA - VERI II B

VERI II B - Teleoperated Vehicle for Investigation 2B - is always forms part of the operational equipment of Groupe INTRA but is now reserved for possible non emergency missions. Robot VERI II B can be teleoperated until a distance of 2 kilometers. It can complete work with its embarked hydraulic tools (shear, power pick and drilling machine).

Credit: Groupe INTRA - ERELT

ERELT is a teleoperated relay robot used to relay the transmissions (Radio-com-mands, radio-measurements, videos, sounds) from and towards other robots and to improve the radioelectrical coverage. Related missions are visual inspection, radioactivity and temperature measurement.  The flexmobil - rubber caterpillar has Deutz 152 HP - air cooled diesel engine, max speed 4,2 m/s and a max distance radio relay of 5 km of fiber optic cable on board, The autonomy in radio relay is about  80 hours. The robot is equipped with 4 cameras, two of which on turrets. The day and night all-terrain robot vehicle has a slope climbing capacity of < 26° and a max hygrometry of 80 % à + 30°C. Operating temperature is - 20°C < T < + 45°C.  The max absorb dose rate level is 1 Gy/h, the max integrated absorb dose is 10 Gy.

The Groupe INTRA is a pole of inventory and expertise for techniques and mobilizable robotics machines in the case of a crisis. Agreement of cooperation with home office. Team and equipment must be ready to intervene within 24/365 on the whole French Territory. INTRA has a permanent staff 20 people and a yearly budget of  4 M€. Global investment  is about 40 M€. Members shares : 50 % EDF 37.5% CEA 12.5% AREVA.

French Humanoid Fights Autism and Loves Academia

At the University of Notre Dame, IN an interdisciplinary research team led by psychology professor Joshua Diehl is studying the effectiveness of robots in behavior-based communication therapies for children with autism, in an effort to break through barriers and discover effective treatment plans. The therapy is based on interaction with humanoid NAO from French Aldebaran. 

Credit: Aldebaran

In France the 10 million Euro Romeo project led by the French Cap Digital business cluster and funded by the Ile-de-France region, the General Directorate for Competitiveness, Industry and Services (DGCIS ex DGE) and the City of Paris, aims to develop a humanoid robot that can act as a comprehensive assistant for persons suffering from loss of autonomy. The first humanoid robot prototype design was published by IEEE Spectrum in December 2010. In autumn 2011 - a few months before the end of the project - a second prototype will be delivered to be used and tested by actual users suffering from loss of autonomy. They will be selected amongst the patients of the Vision Institute. On the ground of Romeo’s project learnings, Aldebaran intends to develop a product which could be on the market by 2015.
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Founded in 2005, Aldebaran Robotics is headquartered in Paris, France and has the ambitious goal of offering humanoid robots to the general public. The  first product, NAO, is a 58-cm tall humanoid robot with the ability to see, hear, speak, feel and communicate with not only the user, but other NAO robots and is already a world-famous star in the academic and humanoid robotics market. Since 2008, Aldebaran Robotics has been providing NAO robots to 200 of the most prestigious universities in the world, including Stanford Research Institute, Harvard, Supelec, Ecole des  Arts et Metiers, KAIST in Korea and  Tsukuba University in Japan. Aldebaran Robotics brings together more than 100 persons—including 45 engineers and PhDs—that are involved in the development and production of the robot. The company currently operates subsidiaries in Shanghai and Boston.

Robots@Future en Seine 2011

Futur en Seine is the festival for digital life and creativity, an international biennial held in Paris and the Paris Region. The coming edition shall take place from the 17th to the 26th of June 2011.

• Gostai will demonstrate Jazz Connect, a project that enables trade fair visitors to avoid highly CO2 emitting journeys by making them digitally present via telepresence robots, which move around and communicate with exhibitors.
• Strate Collège Designers with partners Le CUBE and Le CRIIF will demonstrate a range of robotic urban furniture that interacts with its surroundings.

Futur en Seine 2009 Teaser with english subs
Uploaded by Cap_Digital. - Technology reviews and science news videos.
Futur en Seine 2011 is open to contributions from the worldwide digital community: take part in the festival by answering one of the 4 calls for participation launched by Cap Digital!

Whether you’re a company, research lab, school, institution, or artist, you can apply before the 1st of March at 12:00 (GMT+1).

French Telepresence Robot Gostai Jazz

Gostai is a French robot manufacturer and an editor of innovative software for robotics & Artificial Intelligence. The new Jazz robots line is Gostai’s flagship, with business applications in telepresence and telesurveillance. Jazz integrates Gostai’s innovative softwares. Gostai also develops the Urbi open source operating system for robotics, as well as Gostai Suite, a suite of graphical programming tools for robotics and complex system, and the GostaiNet cloud computing architecture for robotics.


The Gostai Jazz is an autonomous service robot for telepresence in business and security. The Gostai Jazz robot is 1 meter in height and mobile. It is fitted with a camera and include Wi-Fi connectivity. The user can connect to the robot via a web browser and can control it from afar, allowing them to see what the robot’s camera sees in real time. They can also hear what’s going on and can communicate through an embedded loudspeaker. Jazz Connect was designed specifically for business conferencing. The company believes the units could be useful for organisations wishing to reduce their carbon footprints and could reduce travel costs for frequent flyers.

Jazz Security can be used as a form of guard robot. It can patrol autonomously at night using an infrared camera and a map of its surroundings, as well as a laser system to help it localise things. The robot detects suspicious moves to help a night watchman or traditional alarm system. A teleoperator can control it any time there is an alert. Jazz Security can also send SMS alerts if it detects an intruder and LED power lights to illuminate dark areas. Jazz Icon, a much more detailed unit designed to promote a brand or image at points of sales and fairs. Jazz Connect and Icon are available from €7,900. Icon can be rented from €1,800. Jazz Security is available from €8,400.

Urbi Robotic Software Platform Goes Open Source

Open Source Robotics (OSR) is an emerging technology trend to broaden the development basis for next generation robotics. Leading robot engineers believe in the development of a standardised robot based on an open-source operating system in order to kick-start the mass production of next generation service robots. Advantages with OSR are lower development costs, interchangeability and platform independability.

French robotics developer Gostai has announced that its core Urbi Operating System for robotics is now going open source. Urbi is an advanced robotics operating system, already available for a large number of robots like Aldebaran® Nao, Segway® RMP or Lego® Mindstorm, among 15 other different robots. One of its main innovations lies in a new orchestration script language called urbiscript, which natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Next to Urbi, Gostai also offers the Gostai Studio graphical programming tools, and compatibility with various simulators, making the Urbi framework one of the most advanced and complete solution for robot and complex system programming available today. Urbi is also very simple to use, even for beginners. It is perfectly suitable for advanced industrial or academics applications, as well as for the educational market.

The source code is covered by an Affero GNU GPL v3 license and is available for immediate download and use from Gostai’s website. This initiative will allow developers worldwide to participate in the growth of the industry's most innovative robotic software solution.

Other Open Source Robotics initiatives are i.e. the European OROCOS (Open RObot COntrol Software) project, OpenJAUS, ROS (Robot Operating System) open-source software running on the Willow Garage robots.

30 Million Euro for French Robotics

Robotics in France is considered as part of the sciences of information and most of the French robotics researchers are members of academic teams in engineering and information sciences.

Most robotics research in France is conducted by generic research laboratories from CNRS, INRIA, and universities, but also by domain oriented organizations such as CEA (Nuclear), CEMAGREF (Agriculture), CNES (Space), IFREMER (Underwater), INSERM (Health), ONERA (Aeronautics). 

About 800 researchers including 400 PhD students conduct public robotics research in France. About 100 PhD theses are supported every year in the diverse domains related to robotics.

Appr. 30 MEuros of the public funding was dedicated to academic and industrial research in Robotics in 2009. 

Gostai wins Microsoft ACES 2009 Award

French Gostai wins the ACES 2009 Microsoft ICT Academic Enterprise Awards Europe. This prize awards a successful company spin out from academics research, ENSTA Paristech Cognitive Robotics Lab in the case of Gostai.

The core technology is URBI, the Universal Real-time Behavior Interface which is a powerful parallel script engine coupled with the UObject component architecture, usable to control hardware and software components in a flexible and portable way.

The cognitive robotics researchers at ENSTA ParisTech are working on perception and machine learning to endow robots with capabilities to work autonomously and in interaction with humans. One of the main research topic is the problem of grounding symbols in perception in the framework of developmental robotics. We are also working on mobile robot navigation and Human-Robot interaction.

€ 405 Million for Flying Demorobot nEUROn

Image: Saab
At Swedish Saab in Linköping the construction of Europe's experimental Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV), nEUROn, has now started. The nEURON is a €405 million cooperation between several European countries, with French Dassault as master builder. France will provide €202.5 million, half of the program's €405 million budget, while the remaining funds will be supplied by the other participating member nations. Sweden has a 25% stake in nEUROn, with Saab’s responsibilities including supplying its core avionics and mission computer, working on its autonomous capabilities and manufacturing its front and centre fuselage.

nEUROn is a delta wing stealth UCAV demonstration project and not for military operational deployment. A main aim of the nEUROn programme is to sustain and develop European manufacturers' aeronautic and other technologies for next-generation combat aircraft and UAVs.

French Robotics Cluster _ Cap Robotique

Cap Robotique is the first business cluster in France dedicated to the robotics industry. Cap Robotique is opened to every company or laboratory which wants to bring its expertise to the French industry of the domestic service robotics. The cluster gathers yet prestigious protagonists like the CEA LIST or the CNRS LAAS, but also various innovative start-ups, recognized experts of their fields, like Gostai, Spir.Ops or also Voxler.

The Romeo project is a founding and federative project which aims to design, within 3 years, a general public robot, tall and autonomous, dedicated to the service. Officially launched the 22th of January of 2009, the project is mainly financed by the “Ile de France” French region, the French DGE and Paris city. Aldebaran Robotics led the consortium in charge of its development, composed of 13 world-renowned companies and laboratories.

Health Robot NAO

Dr Octavian Purcarea, Global Solutions Manager, Worldwide Health Team, Microsoft Corp. reports on this blog about the use of robots at the San Raffaele Hospital, one of the leading University Hospitals in Italy, to train diabetic children to take the insulin injections. According to Dr. Purcarea the training is so effective that children are showing total adherence to the treatment and become even “proud” to have such condition which allows them to be seen and filmed with the robots. The films are than showed (with the parents and children consent) to the classmates who discover that having diabetes and being obliged to treat yourself is not such a fatality but an excellent occasion to learn a new healthy behavior and even play with robots.

The robots used are Nao's developed by the French company Aldebaran Robotics. The robot is a 58-cm biped robot, that can be programmed and controlled using all available platforms. The hardware has been built from the ground up with the latest technologies providing great fluidity in its movements and offering a wide range of sensors. Demovideo (Quicktime)

DOMEO Companion robot for cognitive and physical stimulation

French Robosoft, is developing and evaluating in real conditions DOMEO, a new companion robotic system that would allow cognitive and physical stimulation. Providing an efficient system to elderly, disabled or simply needing people is very ambitious.

The video below shos how the companion robot can help people in their everyday life, using natural language.