The VORTEX project proposes a new approach for exploring unknown indoor environments using a fleet of autonomous drones (UAVs). We propose to define a strategy based on swarm intelligence exploiting only vision-based behaviors. The fleet will deploy as a dynamic graph self reconfiguring according to events and discovered areas. Without requiring any mapping or wireless communication, the drones will coordinate by mutual perception and communicate by visual signs. This approach will be developed with RGB and event cameras to achieve fast and low-energy navigation. Performance, swarm properties, and robustness will be evaluated by building a demonstrator extending a quadrotor prototype developed in the consortium.

This project aims to propose a declarative language dedicated to cryptanalytic problems in symmetric key cryptography using constraint programming (CP) to simplify the representation of attacks, to improve existing attacks and to build new cryptographic primitives that withstand these attacks. We also want to compare the different tools that can be used to solve these problems: SAT and MILP where the constraints are homogeneous and CP where the heterogeneous constraints can allow a more complex treatment. One of the challenges of this project will be to define global constraints dedicated to the case of symmetric cryptography. Concerning constraint programming, this project will define new dedicated global constraints, will improve the underlying filtering and solution search algorithms and will propose dedicated explanations generated automatically.

An autonomous vehicle is not a “simple” robot, such as a robot companion, but a robot that transports people. That implies that the people inside must feel integrated in the environment, as they would be in a driven car. They expect, as well as people in the surroundings, the cybercar to behave accordingly adhering to social and urban conventions and negotiating its path among crowded environments. This is a new challenging topic that must and will be tackled in the HIANIC project. This project is part of the “Axe : Véhicules propres, sûrs, connectés, automatisés ” of the “défi 6 – mobilité et systèmes urbains durables. The HIANIC cybercar will analyze its environment by detecting people, evaluating crowd flows, recognizing typical scenarios. It will infer the reaction of the passengers in order to navigate in a way that makes them feel comfortable. Several navigation strategies will collaborate to adapt the movement of the cybercar to the typical scenarios. For example, in a crowded environment, the cybercar will move using reactive navigation but in less cluttered environments, human-aware navigation will be used. Finally, the vehicle will communicate its intention to the passengers and pedestrians and pay attention to its environment (passengers and pedestrians), increasing its knowledge of the situation for handling emergency situations. Such a system will contribute both to urban safety and intelligent mobility in “shared spaces”. Negotiation will help to avoid frozen situations increasing the vehicle’s reactivity and optimizing the navigable space. Negotiation, Human-Aware Navigation and Communication will contribute to a better public acceptance of such autonomous systems and facilitate their penetration in the transportation landscape.

The ambition of this project is to develop a new parallel robot architecture that can be moved for machining and drilling tasks on large parts or assemblies in the aeronautical and naval fields. This architecture must meet the requirements of stiffness but also lightness to minimize the energy consumption necessary to move it. With this objective, the project's originality is to focus on robots with over_constrained parallel architecture; this type of architecture makes it possible to reduce the weight of the mobile elements while offering high stiffness performance. The design of industrializable OPKMs involves transversal and innovative work in scientific topics such as mechanism synthesis, over-constrained mechanism tolerancing and modeling of the robot architecture behavior loaded by forces induced by hyperstatism. The challenge is to control the behavior and manufacturing cost of this kind of robot with regard to weight and energy consumption benefit. Work will be carried out on validating the choice of architecture for robotic machining. It will consist of comparing the performance of different robots with proposed architectures. This work should make it possible to define tools and simple formalisms allowing the analysis of the behavior of over-constrained mechanisms. In parallel, work will be carried out on the definition and quantification of the element tolerancing of over-constrained parallel architecture robot. They should make it possible to propose an elasto-geometric model integrating the assembly and manufacturing defects of the architecture of the robot. This work will lead to a compromise between the size of the tolerance intervals (and therefore the cost) and the stiffness at the tool tip. This project will lead to the design and manufacture of a prototype.

The Spectre vulnerability has recently been reported, which affects most modern processors. The idea is that attackers can extract information about the private data using a timing attack. It is an example of side channel attacks, where secure information flows through side channels unintentionally. How to systematically mitigate such attacks is an important and yet challenging research problem. We propose to automatically synthesize mitigation of side channel attacks (e.g., timing or cache) using formal verification techniques. The idea is to reduce this problem to the parameter synthesis problem of a given formalism (for instance, variants of the well-known formalism of parametric timed automata). Given a program/system with design parameters which can be tuned to mitigate side channel attacks, our approach will automatically generate provably *secure* valuations of these parameters. We will use a 3-phase research plan: 1. define formally the problem of timing information leakage; 2. propose optimized parametric model checking algorithms for information leakage checking; 3. propose optimizations and methods translating real-worlds systems and programs into our formalisms to achieve practical scalability. We plan to deliver a fully automated toolkit which can be automatically applied to real-world systems including, those in the DARPA challenge. This project will benefit from the synergy of 5 scientists in 4 partner labs, with a complementary expertise in security, formal methods and program analysis.