Armines

ARMINES is a non-profit making organisation funded in 1967 and created in accordance with the French Act of 1901. The relationship of ARMINES with the engineering and management schools is governed by agreements, notably the Ecoles des Mines network under the supervision of the Ministry of Industry. All Armines laboratories are Joint Research Unit employing staff from Armines and its partner schools. The laboratories involved in Angels are Joint Research Unit between Armines and the Ecole des Mines de Nantes. ARMINES was the first partnership research structure created in France. In line with the nature of partnership research, the operational unit is the joint research centre managed jointly by ARMINES and its partner engineering schools where each provides personnel, investment and operating resources according to the volume of contractual activity.

With a turnover of €35 million (2005), ARMINES is the leading French Research and Technology Organisation (RTO). For this project, ARMINES will deploy 3 Research Centres and its European Affairs office.

IRCCyN is involved in ANGELS through its Robotic team. The 8 permanent members of this team has published 33 articles in ISI journals in the last 4 years, focusing on the modelling, identification and control of robots, with a particular interest in bio-inspired walking and swimming robots. The team is today supervising the conception and construction of an eel-like robot designed for autonomous 3-dimensional swimming with navigation based on electric sensing. The knowledge of the control of swimming and modelling of electric images produced in this project will provide a firm base for the start of ANGELS. The SUBATECH team “INstrumentation, CApteurs et DEtecteurs ” (INCADE) has designed and developed new concepts for sensors based on nuclear technologies (LHC at CERN). Developments include the whole chain from detectors to the electronic acquisition chain. INCADE has participated in FP6 project “nom du projet”, en une phrase)... Pol Bernard Gossiaux, a theoretical physicist from this laboratory, , will be responsible for modelling and simulation in electromagnetism in WP2, in collaboration with WPs3 and 4. The Department of Energetics and Environmental Engineering of the Ecole des Mines de Nantes (DSEE) includes about 50 persons (4 professors - 18 researchers). The principal research topics are energy conversion and planning, and environmental products and processes.

The office of European Affairs (AE) will act as the Administrative, Financial and Legal Manager. ARMINES has been taking part in major European research programmes for over 15 years and set up a special European Affairs Unit in 1993 to support researchers involved in such programmes. With 6 permanent employees dedicated to the administrative, financial and legal support, the European Affairs Direction of ARMINES currently manages 21 European projects as Coordinator and is involved in 91 other projects as a partner. A specific web platform was developed in-house to manage these consortia in 2004, available at www.armines-euromanagement.fr. ARMINES is a member of the European Industrial Research Management Association (EIRMA), the European Association of Research and Technology Organisations (EARTO) and the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA). Since 2007 ARMINES is also a member of the FP7 National Contact Point dedicated to the administrative, financial and legal issues for France.

ARMINES will also be the administrative, financial, and legal Coordinator responsible for ensuring that the consortium meets its contractual commitments towards the European Commission. ARMINES will follow the project daily using experience-proven process and management tools. As Coordinator, ARMINES will organise all correspondence between the European Commission and the participants in the project. The European Affairs Unit within ARMINES is composed of European Project Managers with years of experience in the management of European contracts. Under the supervision of the Director for European Affairs, each manager covers a portfolio of several projects in close personal collaboration with the Scientific Coordinators. The General Counsel of ARMINES will monitor each project closely for all issues related to intellectual property rights.

Key personnel for ARMINES-IRCCyN

Frédéric Boyer has been Associate Professor at the Automatic Control department of the Ecole des Mines de Nantes (France) since 1995. His research research topics include Structural Dynamics, Geometric Mechanics and Bio-mimetic Robotics, carried out as leader of the Robotics team of the Institut of Recherche and Communication and Cybernétique of Nantes (IRCCyN). He has published over 20 peer-reviewed articles in ISI Jounals and was awarded the Monpetit prize of Academy of Sciences of Paris in 2007 for the ensemble of his work in Dynamics. He has coordinated a French project supported by CNRS “Robot Anguille” and he is today coordinating the national project RAAMO supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, whose purpose is to construct an electric eel-like robot designed for obstacle avoidance. He will be the scientific coordinator of ANGELS, and will work in WP2 on the modelling of electrical and mechanical phenomena, in particular their couplings, for all the questions addressed by the other Work Packages.

Alexis Girin is a research Engineer in the Robotics team of the IRCCyN (since 2007) Laboratory (UMR CNRS 6597), at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes. His current research interests include estimation methods (Extended Kalman Filter, Sliding modes, High Gain), modelling, electrolocation and mechatronic system. He has published over 11 peer-reviewed articles
(international journals and conferences). He has also worked on projects concerning the control and estimation of position-force electropneumatic actuator for steering mechanism. He will contribute to WP3 in ANGELS, as a specialist in perception methods: (1) in observer design to study the links between perception and locomotion; this will include the design of a predictive-corrective filter; (2) in observability analysis to study the possibility of indistinguishable cases, and (3) in the adaptation of the EPFL perception methods for real-time by using a Kalman multi-agent observer. He is the scientific and technical manager of ANGELS.

Key personnel for ARMINES-SUBATECH

Pol Bernard Gossiaux has been Associate Professor at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes (department SUBATECH) since 1997. He obtained his PhD in theoretical nuclear and particle physics at Liege (1993) and then held postdoctoral fellowships at SUBATECH (Nantes, France), MPI für kernpysik (Heidelberg, Germany) and NSCL (East Lansing, USA) before joining EMN. Together with his main research activities devoted to the theoretical understanding of ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions, he has acquired skills in modeling of complex systems and in numerical analysis. He has been teaching the “electromagnetism” course for 10 years at Ecole des Mines and has acquired a solid background in this topic. He has published more than 20 peer-reviewed articles and has recently started to work on the electrolocation concepts within the frame of the RAAMO project. He will be involved in the WP2 package of ANGELS (especially the electrical phenomenon), as well as at the interface between WP2 and WP3/4.

Key personnel for ARMINES-DSEE

Camille Solliec graduated in chemical and energy engineering from Nantes University (France) in 1980. In 1982, he obtained his master of science in Fluid Dynamics, Transfers and Naval Hydrodynamics at the Central School of Nantes. Three years later (1985) he obtained his PhD degree in the same school. Between 1985 and 1992 he worked as a research scientist for the CNRS and for the Technical and Scientific Center for Buildings. Since 1993, he is assistant Professor and now Professor at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes in the Energy and Environmental Department which is a part of the UMR CNRS GEPEA. His research topics include fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfers in processes. He is the co-author of several scientific papers and communications and reviewer for several international scientific journals. In ANGELS, he will study in WP4 the collective swimming and docking mechanism from fluid mechanics experimentations.

Fabien Candelier is a postdoctoral fellow and he has joined the DSEE in September 2007. His has a PhD in Fluid Mechanics from the University of Nancy (2005). He has also done postdoctoral study at the Universities of Grenoble (2005/2006) and Marseille (2006/2007)). His research topics concern fluid/structure interactions, and in particular, multiphase flows. He has already published over 6 papers in the main journals of his research topics. He will work in the WP2 and 4

Key personnel for EA

Valentine Vierne obtained a Master degree (Paris-2003) on European projects management. She has been working at ARMINES since 2003 where she currently manages the financial and administrative issues of 5 European projects within FP6, both coordinated by ARMINES or by another institution which delegates the AFL management to ARMINES. She is the contact point of ARMINES for the European funds in the field of ICT, Health, BKKE and ERC.

References

• http://www.armines-euromanagement.fr
• http://www.irccyn.ec-nantes.fr
• http://www.emn.fr

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