Research & Development Engineer position on Social Robotics at Inria, in Grenoble, France

The Inria research centre in Lyon is the 9th Inria research centre, formally created in January 2022.  It brings together approximately 300 people in 17 research teams and research support services.

Its staff are distributed in Villeurbanne, Lyon Gerland, and Saint-Etienne.

The Lyon centre is active in the fields of software, distributed and high-performance computing, embedded systems, quantum computing and privacy in the digital world, but also in digital health and computational biology.

Chroma is an Inria research team located in Lyon and Grenoble, which aims at designing algorithms and models to allow autonomous agents to perceive, decide, learn and adapt to their environment, by bringing together probabilistic methods, machine learning, planning techniques, multi-agent decision making, and constrained optimisation tools.
The team develops and maintains many experimental plateforms, and is involved in many academic and industrial projects in the field of Mobile Robotics and Autonomous Vehicles.

The proposed 1-year (extendible) Research & Development Engineer position is part of a collaborative project with Enchanted Tools (https://enchanted.tools/) to transfer technologies designed by the Chroma team to Enchanted Tools' Mirokai robot.

Within the framework of the above-mentioned project, the objectives are to develop, optimize, extend and deploy our social convention representation models for the navigation of social robots in hospitals, in the presence of humans and other robots.

The work will involve transferring the research work carried out by the team, initially on a wheelchair (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtwgwGOgIM0), to the Mirokai robotic platform developed by Enchanted Tools (https://enchanted.tools/robot). The first step will be to develop software bricks validated in simulation, then to transfer these bricks to the real robot and carry out tests in an environment populated by humans. The final stage will be to test these bricks in a hospital environment (Station H in Lyon).

The engineer recruited will work within a team of engineers already working on several robotics projects, in interaction with doctoral students and researchers from the Chroma team. He/she will be expected to reinforce the existing skills of the engineering team, by contributing or developing expertise in :

    - Modeling human environments, proxemics, social conventions
    - Planning trajectories that respects social conventions (human-aware navigation, leader tracking, etc.).

The engineer recruited will also help set up demonstrations, and may be involved in scientific publications and international conferences. He/she will probably be required to travel to Lyon and Paris to work more closely with partners.

The activities of the engineer recruited will consist of :

- Developing bricks for modeling social environments
- Develop bricks for social navigation
- Adapt existing technological bricks to the sensors and actuators of the Mirokai robot
- Propose and develop new methods and algorithms, and integrate them into the current framework.
- Write documentation, reports and scientific articles.
- Carry out tests using simulation tools and experimental platforms.
- Take part in presentations and demonstrations with the Mirokai robot to a variety of audiences.
- Work in close collaboration with Enchanted Tools engineers.

- Engineer with R&D experience or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics or closely related fields.
- Good theoretical and practical background in one of the following domains: Social Robotics, Scene Understanding, Trajectory planning, Human-Aware navigation.

The following qualifications would be an advantage:

- Experience using the Robotics library ROS
- Good skills in C/C++.
- Good skills in Linux, system management.
- Ability to work as a teammate with other researchers
- French and English skills (written and spoken)

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking (90 days / year) and flexible organization of working hours Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage under conditions

From 2,692 € (depending on experience and qualifications).