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David Colliaux PhD

David Colliaux PhD

Sony Computer Science Laboratories Paris

The dynamics of life is a fascinating puzzle unfolding at multiple scales. Biological systems involved in perception and behavior also underlies our ability to grasp meaning from the world. They amaze me by their robustness in sensing their environment, for example, for photosynthesis or vision, and they inspire me to develop new technologies and discover new scientific perspectives on animals, plants and microbes in their respective ecosystems. I currently develop artificial intelligence and robotic systems to help people managing micro-farms. Farmers and plant biologists are both experts at growing plants although they rarely exchange their knowledge. I aim at bringing them together around new technologies so that their knowledge can be transferred. I design new hardware to intervene on crops and acquire in-field data. These data are then integrated through mathematical modeling to get a useful description of the field and to point the farmer to the possible actions he can take. I also hope to surprise biologists and farmers about how machines might teach them about the biology of wild plants.

The robotic farmer as a naturalist

What does it take for a robot to be a substitute for a farmer? I present examples we implemented for the robot to observe, interpret, and intervene in the field. I also present the state of the art deep learning architectures for semantic segmentation and how we use it for the robot.