PROJECT BOAT 1550 BC
Interreg IV A 2 Mers Seas Zeeën
Once upon a time, people could walk all the way from Calais to Dover and back again, but the changing geological and climatic face of the Earth meant that in 8000 B.C. the land between these two places was inundated by the sea. From then on, the mainland would be physically cut off from a vast island by the Channel and the North Sea.
In 1530 B.C., the Bronze Age was in full swing in Europe; men there had been farmers for several thousand years before they started to make and use metal tools. Abbe was then 20. He lived by the sea, in a village where people grew crops, bred cattle and traded with their inland neighbours as well as those across the Channel. The latter, rather than acting as a barrier, was a highway, bridging the gap between very similar communities on either side of the water. Abbe crossed these seas in a great boat of oak, which after many years of service, worn and patched, was abandoned in a river valley where it was slowly buried by a thick blanket of protective silts...

We proposed to french « Région Pas-de-Calais » (RNPC) to study another region, located in western Syria, on the rignt bank of the Middle Orontes, down-stream from the city of Hama (chief  town of the mohafazat), with two main quadrangular sites, tell al-Nasriyah and tell Massin, which were granted to our team by the DGAM of Damascus in the beginning of 2007 (general direction of antiquities and museums). We shall specially work on the Bronze and Iron ages but other teams will collaborate with us on other periods from Paleolithic down to Mamelouk.
 

The aim of this project is to study, through a pluridisciplinary approach, the interactions between sensory processing and motor representations in the perception of peripersonal space. Our working hypothesis is that the perception of the boundary of peripersonal space represents a kind of embodied perception, which requires predicting the consequences of potential action towards visual objects in the environment. According to this view, independently of whether a motor action is performed or not, a visual stimulus can be mapped in motor terms and a predictive model associated with action planning can be used to simulate the expected dynamic behaviour of the body in relation to the environment. The role of the predictive model is to optimise the control of motor activity and also to provide by anticipation information about the feasibility of potential motor actions.

The goal of this fundamental research project is to propose a new way to consider interactive robotics i.e. create robots acquire in an autonomous way new skills for the safe collaborative interactions with humans or other robots. The construction of an instrumented prototype composed of a head, a neck and an arm ending with a two-fingered hand will allow to test architectures issued from different partners in the field of epigenetic robotics (psychology, development, neurosciences, biomechanics, and robotics).

The movements produced by our motor systems are highly variable. This is apparent in activities requiring precise movements such as golf, darts, basketball, dance or piano. From a computational perspective, the task of motor control is to use sensory inputs to generate motor commands that will accomplish a particular goal. The observation that given an identical sensory input and a unique goal, a motor system is unable to produce exactly the same motor command several times in succession is puzzling. Yet, traditionally the variability of motor behavior has been dismissed as insignificant in many theories of motor learning and motor control, and treated operationally as a standard deviation in distributional statistics.

Our team aims to study the way in which the reception of the myth of Alexander the Great and its extraordinary dissemination from the twelfth century until the first half of the sixteenth century in Western and Eastern Europe inspired an extremely large number of new literary works which kept reinventing the myth. The latter do show a specifically mediaeval heroic and royal character in the making, which is both unique and diverse, since it keeps changing in the different varieties of European literatures.