Atos plans to join MAESTRO, the robotics consortium launched by Inria and CNRS in July 2026.
This membership aligns with a new five-year strategic partnership between Atos and Inria, focused on translating research into sovereign industrial applications.
Led by the joint project team WILLOW, which brings together CNRS, ENS-PSL and Inria, MAESTRO Robotics, launched on July 3, 2026, seeks to endow robots with more robust autonomy in complex, dynamic, and open environments.
The consortium emphasizes an “open, frugal, and sovereign” approach to robotics. It aims to reduce European technological dependency while making software building blocks accessible to the scientific community and industry alike.
The components are released under permissive open-source licenses, primarily BSD, and are designed as an integrated ecosystem. The consortium also oversees the maintenance, integration, standardization, and long-term governance of these tools.
The Technical Building Blocks
MAESTRO draws on several software packages developed as part of work by Inria and CNRS. They cover robotic dynamics, collision detection, optimal control, physical simulation, and numerical optimization.
- Pinocchio for the dynamics of robotic systems.
- COAL for collision detection.
- Aligator for optimal control.
- ProxSuite for numerical optimization.
- Simple for differentiable physical simulation.
- EigenPy for bridging Python and the Eigen library.
The approach notably relies on differentiable control architectures, which combine physical modeling and machine learning to improve the precision, speed, and adaptability of robots.
Industry and Research United
At launch, Renault, Safran, Wandercraft, and Helsing had signaled their intention to join the initiative. Their use cases span automotive industry, medical exoskeletons, defense, and aerospace manufacturing.
Atos’ participation strengthens the robotics dimension of the collaboration and brings the company closer to the work of WILLOW.
