Cycab and Bip
2000 in Hanover
A counterpart to the chronophotographs by Etienne-Jules Marey that adorn the facade of the French pavilion, the Bip 2000 robot illustrates the most recent advances in the field of walk reproduction. The robot was designed and built by the Laboratory for Solid Mechanics of the University of Poitiers. Its control and command system was developed by INRIA Rhône-Alpes researchers. Even though it is comprised of only two legs, a pelvis and a torso, Bip 2000 is nonetheless at the leading edge of biped robots. The robot has numerous articulations, nine of which are situated in the pelvis and hips, which enable it to sway on one foot. Another totally new feature of Bip 2000 is the use of parallel robots to simultaneously operate several articulations. Finally, the robot's moves are controlled by a specific real-time command system developed with ORCCAD, a software whose quality facilitated the development of programs and the testing. In a further stage, the robot will be equipped with captors to avoid obstacles and a distributed computing structure to greatly increase its computational power.
Bip 2000 is still a prototype, but Cycab, a small public, self-service vehicle
for pedestrianized centers, is now being marketed by the Robosoft company. Cycab
is the result of a partnership with the RATP, EDF and Andruet. It is one of
the very first road vehicles to be entirely computer driven. Cycab can operate
in automatic mode, manual joystick driving mode, or remote driving mode using
a video transmission of what is "seen" by the vehicle. The on-board
electronics architecture was designed by INRIA and all the applications were
programmed using SynDEx (Synchronized Distributed Executive), a computer-aided
real-time distributed application implementation software developed within project
SOSSO. The main strength of this software is to allow for fast and very secure
programming of complex applications running optimally on a set of processors.
A sign of success if one is needed: a contract was signed last May with Yamaha
to implement this technology on some of the firm¹s vehicles and conduct a full
scale experiment on the INRIA Rocquencourt site.
Légendes:
Facade of the French pavilion: Etienne-Jules Marey © Cinémathèque
franēaise
Bip 2000 © INRIA, A.Eidelman
Cycab © INRIA, A.Eidelman
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