INRIA

Professionnal outline

Michel Parent is currently the program director at INRIA of the R&D effort in " La Route Automatisée ", a program he initiated with INRETS while he was working in the Praxitele project. This new program is issued in part from his research about a novel public transportation system based on small automated electric cars, he started in 1991. Praxitele was the first version of such a system. It started in 1993 with a consortium which included besides the two public research institutes INRIA and INRETS, Renault, the automobile manufacturer, CGEA, a large public transit operator in France and abroad, Dassault Automatismes et Télécommunications, a large electronics company, and EDF, the national electric utility. Praxitele has been succesfully tested in the city of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines between 1997 and 1999 with 50 electric cars from Renault. During Praxitele, Michel Parent designed the CyCab which includes drive-by-wire and automatic driving and is now manufactured by Robosoft.

Michel Parent has spent half of his time in research and academia at such places as Stanford University and MIT in the USA and INRIA in France, and the other half in industry where he was the leading scientist in two SME involved in automation projects.

He started his career as a researcher at INRIA where he became a respected specialist in the field of computer modeling and simulation. He then moved to be the assistant director of the first French national project in robotics for the handicapped : the Spartacus project. After Spartacus he was invited to Stanford to work on robotics aids for the handicapped where he developed in 1980 the first computer-driven electric wheelchair which used voice control and ultra-sonic sensors for guidance. In the industry he worked on various automation projects and in the late 80's on mobile robots and in particular on the DARDS project which is financed by the French Army to experiment with totally automated vehicles. He also developed for the French railroads (SNCF) a concept of automated vehicle to move freight containers which was tested in the early 90's (Commutor Project).

In 1989, he returned to the United States to spend two years at MIT where he was one of the two leading scientists on a large program with industry to develop new techniques and new materials in housing construction. During this program, a prototype house was built using these novel technologies.

Michel Parent was the president of the French Robotics Association between 1982 and 1990 and he is the author of several books on robotics and vision and of many scientific papers. He has organized several national and international seminars or conferences and has been teaching at various schools and universities. Michel Parent is a car enthousiast and one of his hobbies is antique car restoration. His main achievement in this field was the full restoration of a 1955 MG TF.

Michel Parent has an engineering degree from the French Aeronautics School (ENSAE), a Masters degree in Operation Research and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University, USA.