INRIA
INRIA, the French Institute for research in computer science and control, is the only French public institute entirely dedicated to research in information and communication science and technology (ICST).
Throughout its eight research centres, INRIA has a workforce of 3 800 (2 800 of whom are scientists from INRIA and its partner organizations).
INRIA has an annual budget of 186 million euros, 20% of which comes from its own research contracts and development products.
In its 2008-2012 Strategic Plan, INRIA has defined seven scientific priorities:
· Modelling, simulation and optimisation of complex dynamic systems
· Programming: security and reliability of computing systems
· Communication, information, and ubiquitous computing
· Interaction with real and virtual worlds
· Computational engineering
· Computational sciences
· Computational medicine
As its strategy closely combines scientific excellence with technology transfer, it develops collaborations with the economic world through strategic industrial partners and by creating some 90 companies since 1984.
INRIA is partner in more than 120 FP6 projects (90 in the IST priority). Concerning the FP7, the results of the first calls have been announced. INRIA is involved in more than 85 selected proposals. In the ICT theme of the Cooperation programme, INRIA is participant in 50 selected proposals.
The COPRIN project-team of INRIA has developed in the past various prototypes of parallel structures either for its own use or for industrial companies (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Alcatel, Construction Mecanique des Vosges, Paulstra,..). It has also participated to several Europen projects (the last one has been the ARES STREP 15653 project) and various other national projects (ANR project SIROPA).
On the theoretical side the expertise of COPRIN is kinematics of parallel robots, appropriate design (i.e. dimensioning of the structure to ensure that a given list of requirements is fulfilled), taking into account unavoidable uncertainties in the real robot (e.g due to manufacturing tolerances).
The COPRIN INRIA team has developed since 3 years a prototype of cables robots using linear actuators and is currently developing three new prototypes, one of which is a very large robotized crane. These prototypes will be used as experimental platform for this project.
[+] info: http://www.inria.fr/en/centre/sophia