Short Biography

Dr. Rachid Alami is Senior Scientist (Directeur de Recherche) at CNRS.

He holds since 2019 the Academic Chair on Cognitive and Interactive Robotics at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute (ANITI)

Education and Duties

Rachid Alami received an engineer diploma in computer science in 1978 from ENSEEIHT, a PhD in Robotics in 1983 from Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse (INPT) and a Habilitation HDR in 1996 from Université Paul Sabatier.

He joined CNRS as Junior Scientist in October 1984.

Rachid Alami is the founder and served as the head of the Robotics and InteractionS (RIS) team during 10 years.

He served 8 years as the head of the LAAS Robotics Department.

He served 6 years as co-chair of the Interactive Robotics SIG at the French Research Group in Robotics (GDR Robotique)

He also coordinated during 4 years the Ambient Intelligence initiative of LAAS.

Scientific Contributions

His main research contributions cover several key aspects of cognitive robotics and AI related topics:

  • Decisional abilities for Cognitive and Interactive Robots that (Decision for HRI)
  • Human-Aware Motion Planning
  • Combined Task and Motion Planning (Intricate Symbolic and Geometric Reasoning)
  • Multi-robot coordination and cooperation
  • Control Architectures and tools for building autonomous robot systems
  • Action and Task Planning
  • Robot Motion Planning
  • Flexible Assembly Cells Programming and Control

In each of these topics he contributed substantially and published original and well-known and cited results.
He also engaged in the collaborative development and deployment of several fully integrated autonomous that has been shown and demonstrated in several national (exhibitions, museum and cultural events, like SITEF, Cité de l'Espace, Novella-2012), or European events (Hertfordshire, Barcelona, Prague, Amsterdam)

PhDs, Post-Docs and Masters Students

Rachid Alami has dedicated important efforts in advising young researchers: to date, 47 PhDs (with 40 already defended), 19 Postdocs, 56 Master students.

Collaborations and Results

He contributed and took responsibilities in several national, European and international research and/or collaborative projects. The main projects to which he contributed are:

International:

  • Taiwan-France Cluster of Excellence I-RiCE NTU (2012 - 2017)

Europe:

  • EUREKA: FAMOS, AMR and I-ARES projects,
  • ESPRIT: MARTHA, PROMotion, ECLA
  • IST FP5: COMETS
  • IST FP6 projects: COGNIRON, URUS, PHRIENDS
  • IST FP7 projects: CHRIS, SAPHARI, ARCAS, SPENCER
  • H2020 projects: AEROARMS, MuMMER
  • Horizon Europe: euROBIN, TRAIL

France:

  • ARA National Program (1980 - 1986)
  • VAP-RISP for planetary rovers
  • ROBEA Project HR+
  • RTRA STAE ROSACE project
  • ANR projects: AMORCES, MaRDi, ROBOERGOSUM, JointAction4HRI, Flying CoWorker
  • Japan-Germany-France Trilateral Collaborative project;: AI4HRI

He is finally engaged in long-term multidisciplinary collaboration. Robotics itself needs integration and therefore close collaboration of several competences from mechanical design, to control, perception and AI but Rachid Alami has also developed collaboration with philosophers, developmental psychologists, ergonomists.