Marvin* is a research group of the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble that investigates the approaches of Artificial Intelligence for robotics and intelligent systems. Robots performing complex tasks in stochastic environments, such as helping humans at home or collaborating with humans in industries require cognitive skills to interpret sensor data, understand scenes, select and perform actions, deal with failures and interact with humans.

Marvin devise new methods of perception, decision and interaction for robots based on AI planning and machine learning techniques. One of the main focuses of the group is the integration of these techniques into different robotic platforms and architectures.

Research Themes

  1. AI Planning and Scheduling : Reasoning and acting AI systems fulfilling complex user-assigned tasks.
  2. Human-Robot Interaction : Acceptability, affective computing, dialogue.

Impact Area

  1. Collaborative robotics (Cobotics): Robots working with humans in an industrial environment.
  2. Manufacturing: Invent the “factory of the future”. Human tasks optimised by AI scheduling and algorithms.
  3. Social Robotics:Social robots in daily life environment interacting closely with humans.
  4. Service Robotics: Assist people typically by performing tasks that are dirty, dangerous or repetitive.

(*) Marvin refers to Marvin Minsky, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence, but also to the fictional robot Marvin, the ship's robot in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams.