The Laboratoire national de métrologie et d’essais (LNE) is a public body attached to the French Ministry of Industry. It is the central and federating body for testing, evaluation and metrology work aimed at standardizing, structuring and supporting the supply of new products, seeking both to protect and meet the needs of consumers and to rationalize, develop and promote the industry. Within this framework, it conducts projects on the evaluation, qualification and certification of products and technologies to support breakthrough innovations (artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies, additive manufacturing, radioactivity measurement, hydrogen storage, etc.), for the benefit of the scientific, normative, regulatory and industrial community.
LNE has a unique expertise in Europe on the evaluation of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics systems. It has carried out more than 900 evaluations of intelligent systems since 2008, notably in language processing (translation, transcription, speaker recognition, etc.), image processing (person recognition, object recognition, etc.) and robotics (autonomous vehicles, service robots, agricultural robots, collaborative robots, intelligent medical devices, inspection and maintenance robots, industrial robots, etc.). Among more than 15 on-going projects about AI evaluation, LNE is coordinating the H2020 METRICS project (https://metricsproject.eu/) that aims at organizing challenge-led robotics competitions in the four Priority Areas (PAs) identified in the topic ICT-09-2019-2020: Healthcare, Inspection and Maintenance, Agri-Food, and Agile Production. LNE participates in the major challenges of AI and robotics by developing standards and benchmarks to guarantee and certify these technologies (participation in the Afnor Information and Digital Communication Strategic Orientation Committee, the Afnor and ISO AI Commission and Section 81 of the Union de Normalisation de la Mécanique on industrial robotics).
