CRESCENDO Selected as a Laureate of the Pionniers de l'IA Programme
CRESCENDO Selected as a Laureate of the Pionniers de l’IA Programme
CRESCENDO, the project carried by Inria on behalf of the Willow research team (Inria / ENS-PSL / CNRS) that underpins the launch of the Maestro Consortium, has been selected among the laureates of the second wave of the “Pionniers de l’intelligence artificielle” call for projects. The programme is part of the France 2030 plan and is jointly operated by Bpifrance and Inria’s Gence de Programme du Numérique.
A sovereign answer to a strategic gap
Pionniers de l’IA is a staged funding instrument designed to accelerate the transition of high-potential AI research into industrial deployment, with a particular focus on France and Europe’s technological sovereignty. CRESCENDO was selected for its scientific originality, its direct relevance to AI sovereignty, and its credible pathway to economic impact.
The project targets a concrete gap: the absence of a sovereign European alternative for differentiable physics simulation in robotics. Its centrepiece is Simple, the differentiable rigid-body simulator developed within the Willow team, which exposes analytical derivatives throughout the contact pipeline — a property that enables direct gradient-based training of controllers on physical hardware, at the latencies required for real-time control. From research prototype to an industrial-grade simulator
Phase 1 of CRESCENDO, funded with €200,000 over twelve months (July 2026 – June 2027), will:
- finalise Simple’s differentiable components, extending analytical derivatives to joint friction, bilateral constraints, and contact-patch formulations;
- define and publish open benchmarking suites for offline dexterous manipulation and online locomotion;
- deliver a comparative evaluation of the full Maestro stack — Pinocchio, COAL, Simple and Aligator — against existing reference simulators.