PARMATAC: Advanced Mobile Aerial and Ground Robotics Platforms for Autonomous and Collaborative Navigation

Autonomous mobile robots are finding increasing applications in a variety of fields: transport, industry, surveillance, agriculture, marine engineering, etc. These heterogeneous and connected robots operate in complex environments where their on-board perception systems remain limited. By exchanging data via wireless communications with infrastructure and other robots, it is possible to expand their scope of action and optimise their navigation. The operational safety of drones and autonomous vehicles, whatever the environmental conditions, is essential for their large-scale deployment.

The PARMATAC project aims to test and validate technologies that enhance the robustness of these systems through the concept of extended perception, combining drones, autonomous vehicles and connected infrastructure.
The robotics experts of the ARMEN (Autonomous Robots and Control of Interactions with the Environment) research team at the Laboratory of Digital Sciences of Nantes  (LS2N) design and control land and air robots, particularly flying manipulators for grasping and transporting objects. This research, which is just gaining traction in Europe, has enabled the team to become a recognized player in the field. Thanks to its rapid growth, the team now has an indoor flight arena, drones, and a motion capture system. To maintain its expertise, it needs to expand its experimental capabilities.

To strengthen experimental research in this field, the school is investing in a new research platform with ambitious equipment:

• equipped and instrumented indoor and outdoor drone flight arenas,
• a fleet of heterogeneous drones,
• a mapping vehicle with high-definition perception and localization sensors for outdoor environments, and
• a secure testing area shared by drones and autonomous vehicles. This space, protected by a net, will provide a test environment where land and air robots will interact in real time, collaboratively and in a coordinated manner.

Within the PARMATAC project, the objective is both to make scientific progress on these issues of autonomous navigation in dynamic and connected environments with a high degree of robustness and integrity, but also to make technical progress by validating the proposed approaches in real environments through relevant and challenging use cases in order to demonstrate the feasibility and value of a smart, connected, autonomous, and reliable mobility solution.

Vincent Frémont, PARMATAC project leader

Vincent Frémont obtained his master's degree in automation and computer science from Centrale Nantes (France) in 2000 and his PhD in automation and computer science from Centrale Nantes in 2003. From 2005 to 2018, he was an associate professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne (UTC) in the Heudiasyc laboratory.

Since 2018, he has been a professor at Centrale Nantes in the ARMEN team within the LS2N laboratory. His research focuses on multi-sensor perception and scene understanding for autonomous mobile robotics. He has participated in national and international collaborative research projects such as DynaSLAM with Brazil and, until 2018, he was the head of the Défi DIVINA team at Labex MS2T.

Since 2019, he has been the coordinator of the JEMARO Erasmus Mundus Joint Master's programme. He is the principal investigator of the I-Site NExT Senior Talents project, DeepCoSLAM. He has numerous collaborations with industry players. In 2018, he was the deputy director of the SIVALab joint laboratory at Renault-UTC-CNRS on perception and localization issues for autonomous vehicles