Michel PARENT is currently the president of AutoKAB, a new company specialized in the automation of vehicle fleets. This company is a spin-off from the vehicle automation research team from INRIA that he created in 1991. This team focuses on research and development of information and communication technologies for road transport and in particular on fully automated vehicles (the cybercars). He is considered as the “father” of the cybercar concept (in 1991 !) and he was the coordinator of the European Project CyberCars between 2001 and 2004 and several follow-up project.
Before his positions at INRIA, 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 the robotics industry. He was the president of the French Robotics Association between 1974 and 1979. He is the author of several books on robotics, vision and intelligent vehicles, and numerous publications and patents.
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, both from Case Western Reserve University, USA.

It is now widely accepted that in large conurbations, sustainable mobility has to be offered by a combination of high speed, high capacity transport such as suburban trains, metros, tramways, BRTs and complementary individual modes with a priority for walking and other shared or private modes such as cycling, scooters and various low speed modes. Automated road vehicles could fall in this category as long as they are a complement to mass transportation and not as an alternative that would increase congestion. This talk will present the state of the art in automated vehicles and their potential benefits and/or disadvantages.