Plenary speech

Alain Filipowicz

Alain Filipowicz is responsible of partnerships, innovation and research at Continental Digital Services France, working for Commercial Vehicles & Aftermarket Business unit. He graduated in the French Ecole Polytechnique and Supaero, the French Engineer School for Aeronautics and Space. With a career of military engineer, he started working in a missile test range at the Levant Island, then was in charge of the end of the development of the COBRA Radar in Germany, then studied prospective for dual use of space with the CNES, the French national centre for Space, and the armies. He worked after that for the French Ministry of Research to develop projects between industries and academics and has been deputy director of an engineer school in aeronautics. He became afterwards industrial policy manager at the laboratory for analysis and architecture of systems, the LAAS-CNRS. He finished his public career in 2014 being in charge of the research activities of the French Ministry of the Armies. He joined Continental in Toulouse at the end of 2015 to create the eHorizon project.

The future of automotive: moving from embedded systems to system of systems

Embedded - electronic - systems for automotive started in the 80’s with the use of micro controllers. At the beginning, each of them was in charge of an unique function: no real global system was existing. By the time the number of in-cars functions driven by electronics has dramatically increase. Today there are sensors of any kind anywhere, hundreds of computing units and sometimes more than 3 kilometers of cables inside…
The current interior architecture of a car is very complex with different buses and CANs - Car Area Networks - with almost neither updatable nor upgradeable element. All computing units are specific and different. A rationalized architecture, more logical with lower computing units which can be updated or upgraded, is mandatory in cars evolution. Car manufacturers and Tier 1 equipment providers are on this way and preparing these new architectures.With present and future architectures, the car has become a critical computer system, cruising at high speed with people on board. Connecting the car to the cloud is another step further, making it entering into a system of systems.
Why do that? Besides infotainment, connectivity is the way to enhance the horizon of the car, to make it perceive events far beyond the human - and on-board sensors - 300 meters limits. We can now make the car, driver and passenger know very useful information about their travel in terms of safety, energy efficiency and comfort. It has also a lot of interest for maintenance.
Components inside a car are all (almost) digital nowadays. Continental eHorizon project consists in crowdsourcing a lot of data from the cars, send them to the cloud, compute them with third party data to create high-value services that can then be used by any kind of on-board Applications. Such services are dealing with data regarding for example road quality, advised speed, traffic signs, immediate danger alerts and others.
Having a critical computer system in a system of systems makes certain technologies also critical. Embedded system technologies are of course in the package, but also cloud computing, big data issues, safety, events management, cybersecurity, privacy, geolocalization and maps. Artificial intelligence is everywhere, at component and system levels, on-board and in the cloud.

Michaël Gauthier

Michaël Gauthier (IEEE Member), CNRS senior scientist (eq. full professor), is the vice-head of FEMTO-ST institute (750 persons), Besançon, France. He is also president of the French-Swiss Alliance between FEMTO-ST and EPFL named SMYLE. He works in the field of micro-nanorobotics since 2000 and has proposed, modeled and experimented new robotics tools for microhandling and micro-assembly in several European and National projects. He is the author of 2 books, more than 40 papers and 60 conference talks. He is the co-founder of the start-up ‘Percipio Robotics’ providing micro-assembly platforms for industrial applications since 2011. He is currently focusing their works on micro-nano-robots based on non-contact forces and dexterous microgrippers.

Robotic manipulation of micro-nano-objects: from dexterous microhandling to non-contact approaches

This talk presents an overview of recent activities of FEMTO-ST institute in the field of micro-nanomanipulation. Current proof of concept of robotic micromanipulations are currently limited by the number of degree of freedom addressed and also are very limited by their throughput. Two ways can be considered to improve both the velocity and the degrees of freedom: non-contact manipulation and dexterous micromanipulation. Indeed in both ways movement including rotation and translation are done locally and are only limited by the micro-nano-objects inertia which is very low. It consequently enable to generate 6DOF and to induce high dynamics. The presentation will highlight recent works which have shown that controlled trajectories in non-contact manipulation enable to manipulate micro-objects in high speed. Dexterous manipulation on a 4 fingers microtweezers have been also experimented and show that in-hand micromanipulations are possible in micro-nanoscale based on original finger trajectory planning. The future perspectives regarding markets and future scientific challenges of robotic micro-nanohandling will also be addressed.

Mirko Bordignon

Dr. Mirko Bordignon leads the Software Engineering and System Integration Group within the Robotics Department of Fraunhofer IPA in Stuttgart, Germany. He believes that breaking vertically integrated solutions through platforms built on open hardware and software stacks will be key to unlock the full potential of robotics and automation. An academic turned software practitioner and then engineering manager, he aims to advance the automation business by leveraging modern software development tools and practices in the traditionally hardware-focused automation business. He hold degrees from the University of Padova, Italy, and the University of Southern Denmark, and held visiting positions at Orebro University, Sweden, and Harvard University, USA.

Platformed Verticals, Polarized Offerings: Rethinking Robotics and Automation in 2020

A new technological context, diversified points of sales, and sunsetting legacies. Intertwined factors which are both cause and effect of the shifts undergoing in robotics and automation, of which open-source platforms such as ROS-Industrial and its EU instantiation, ROSIN, are the visible -but not the only- distinctive trait. How to surf this wave rather than being submerged by it? The talk will offer some thoughts both on technical aspects and on the general outlook for stakeholders in the field. It will draw inspiration from current trends in industrial automation, and make reference to undergoing initiatives, both public and private, which suggest what the future might hold.