Rikke Frank

Meryem Marzouki

Internet Governance and the Reshaping of Global Human Rights Legacy at WSIS+10 Paper Prepared for the

Introduction

International policy discourses related to the digital environment increasingly reference human rights and fundamental freedoms. From the early debates in the mid--1990s on the human rights implications of internet use, to the new momentum created by Edward Snowden's revelations of State surveillance in 2013, the issue has received considerable attention over the past 20 years. At the global and regional levels, a historical perspective identifies several milestones in this global evolution. To name a few of these milestones: the early WSIS steps (2002--2005), with the "Right to Communicate" vision opposed to one that promoted the identification of practical ways to realize and advance existing human rights in the online environment, with a special emphasis on the indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights; the IGF steps (2006--present), with different stakeholders, on their own or through multi--stakeholder dialogues, working on various initiatives aimed at strengthening the human rights perspective in internet policy; the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) and Universal Periodic Review (UPR) proceedings where, since 2012, global NGO coalitions specializing in human rights on the internet closely cooperated with the (former) UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression who was very attentive towards internet--related issues and the need to address internet policy from a human rights perspective. These efforts, together with some government led actions dedicated to freedom of expression and privacy in particular, have resulted in the adoption of the first two Resolutions focusing specifically on human rights protection on the internet, adopted at the UN Human Rights Council in 2012 1 and 2014 2 , as well as the first two Resolutions on Privacy in the Digital Age, adopted at the UN General Assembly in 2013 3 and 2014 4 . In parallel, the usual process of national and regional (e.g. in the European Union) internet policy making has been going on through legislation, jurisprudence and regulation, often independently of the global discussions and sometimes even detached from the concern raised by some Europeans governments and other institutions in global governance arenas. Likewise, civil society groups and other actors have pursued (sometimes in coordinated efforts) the call for the protection and enforcement of human rights standards in the online domain through advocacy, lobbying, and campaigning, locally as well as regionally. Finally, the emergence of internet giants with the advent of web2.0 and social networking applications and services has raised the fundamental challenge that the conditions for public and private life on the internet depend on infrastructure and platforms governed by the private companies that provide them. In addition to the daily use of such platforms for a major part of our activities, activists' use of social media to organize and publicize their actions to fight authoritarian regimes and/or socio--economic inequalities, have proven to be a common feature among otherwise very different cultural backgrounds, political contexts and associated issues. There is by now common agreement that human rights apply online as they do offline, yet in practice the modalities of the online realm provide significant challenges to human rights protection, many of which remain largely unexplored. Moreover, in the course of the above--mentioned efforts, new "digital rights" have been suggested and advocated by different groups and coalitions, such as the "right to internet access" seen as a necessary precondition to democratic participation; the "right to be forgotten" in the field of privacy and personal data protection. Focusing on these proposed new "digital rights", the authors explore in this paper the background of such proposals and how they have unfolded over time and across various arenas and circumstances. The paper analyzes how different actors (states, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, technical community, internet companies) have been framing and advancing these proposals through either political contention or coalition of interests around key international events and momentum, paying particular attention to the role and influence of WSIS and post--WSIS multi-stakeholder internet governance processes. In conclusion, the authors discuss the broader human rights implications of this development, arguing (1) that it reflects the strong impact of the specifics of the online environment on the very concept of fundamental rights, and (2) may constitute threats to the universality and indivisibility of all human rights, and undermine the level of human rights protection online. Human Rights and Communication Rights: An everlasting controversy? "We […] declare our commitment to a common goal of building a people's internet from below and beyond borders: an internet that works in the public interest and solidarity, where control is in the hands of people; an internet based on human dignity, equality, social justice, freedom and people's communication rights". This sentence opens the 'Tunis Resolution 5 ", adopted by the participants of the Workshop "Organizing an internet Social Forum - A Call to Occupy the internet", held in Tunis as part of the World Social Forum 2015. It is the most recent reference to date to the concept of 'Communication Rights' in an adopted document that, interestingly enough, does not make a single reference to 'Human Rights' as the existing international normative framework defined by the United Nations Bill of Rights (though it was indeed mentioned in the initial 'Call For An internet Social Forum 6 ', which led to the organization of this first workshop as a first step towards the internet Social Forum. 4 Moreover, the Workshop that led to the adoption of this 'Tunis Resolution' was mainly an initiative of the JustNet Coalition (JNC), one of the civil society coalitions active in IGF and most recent related internet governance initiatives 7 . Indeed, all 35 JNC organizational members are signatories of the Call, and constitute half of the overall signatories; furthermore, four of the indicated regional contacts are representatives of JNC organizational members, while the fifth is one of JNC individual members. When looking at JNC organizational members, the insider of WSIS and post--WSIS activities can easily identify some of the most prominent members of the 'Communication Rights in the Information Society' (CRIS) Campaign that played a major role during early WSIS steps, until the end of WSIS first phase in 2003 (CRIS, 2005). Put together, both the framing of the 'Tunis Resolution' text and the identification of major players in the announced internet Social Forum ring a bell, reminding the main controversy related to human rights within civil society during WSIS first phase, that we identified and analyzed at that time (Marzouki and Jørgensen, 2004; Jørgensen and Marzouki, 2005). When adding the continuous confrontation 8 of internet governance visions between (members of) the JNC and BestBits 9 , another main civil society coalition active in the same post--WSIS circles, it becomes clear that we might soon observe a remake, ten or fifteen years later, of the same old controversy. The description and analysis of various civil society components and theiragonistic as well as antagonistic --interactions in post--WSIS developments being beyond the scope and objective of this paper, we will only mention here some of their specific positions on one issue or another when relevant. However, the controversy related to human rights needs to be elaborated upon when analyzing internet governance and the reshaping of global human rights legacy. 7 Founded in February 2014, the JNC introduces itself on its website as "a global network of civil society actors committed to an open, free, just and equitable internet". See http://justnetcoalition.org/. 8 As their exchanges on internet governance mailing lists (including their own ones) attest. 9 The Bestbits coalition describes itself as "an inclusive network of key civil society organizations from across the world, who come together to highlight their various initiatives, and foster mutual learning and broader engagement", see http://bestbits.net/organizer/best--bits/. It started its activities in 2012.

This controversy finds its roots back in the late 1960s, with the proposal of a right to communicate. The right was first suggested by Jean d'Arcy -a pioneer in French and European television --in an attempt to link human rights with recent (at that time) developments in communication technology, in particular satellite communication. Although a precise definition of the right to communicate was never provided, the basic idea was that Article 19 of the UDHR was too narrow to encompass the implications of technological developments, and that the right to communicate should encompass more extensive possibilities, so that electronic communication would no longer be confined to the media elite. Further attempts to define the right to communicate and its practical implementation, most notably in terms of satellite spectrum regulation, led to heated debates at the UNESCO in the mid--70s, with the attempt to promote a so--called "New World Information and Communication Order" (NWICO) (CRIS, 2005: Chapter 2; McKenna, 2011: Chapter 6; Frau--Meigs et al., 2012). At end of this controversy, supporters of the right to communicate were opposed to defenders of the "free flow of information" doctrine, and it finally ended with ideological clashes between the East and the West (that was during the cold war) and between the North and the South (with the Non Aligned Movement, in particular). When the McBride Commission released its report ("Many Voices, One World") in 1980, attempting to define the conditions for realizing a right to communicate, unresolved ideological differences led the US and the UK to withdraw from UNESCO. With the early steps of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) came a resurgence of the right to communicate, this time at the initiative of the "Communication Rights in the Information Society" (CRIS) Campaign. The CRIS campaign proposed the idea of a right to communicate in response to, among others, concerns about media concentration to the civil society plenary formed around WSIS, aiming for general support by civil society. Like in the old NWICO conflict, the idea was opposed in the name of the free flow of information, this time by the Media Caucus. It also faced contradiction from the Human Rights Caucus. The Human Rights Caucus shared the concerns raised by the CRIS campaign, yet disagreed on the means to resolve them. Rather than introducing new human rights, the Human Rights Caucus iterated the need to translate existing human rights to the digital environment, and to identify practical ways of realizing and advancing them, with emphasis on the indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights.

The debate within civil society on this issue at WSIS was resolved by the end of the first WSIS phase. At the "World Forum on Communication Rights10 ", it was agreed that the call for the effective enjoyment of a right to communicate needs not invent new legal standards, but should rather concert in the call for enforcement of existing human rights standards. This shift was explicitly acknowledged by the CRIS Campaign: "the use of the term "communication rights", since it is in the plural form, implicitly points towards existing human rights that relate to communication, and away from promoting a new formal right to communicate, in the singular, in international law. The emphasis shifts subtly to realizing the existing communication rights on the ground, not on establishing a new right under international law" (CRIS, 2005: p. 19). Another controversy within civil society we highlighted ten years ago was the linkage between human rights and development (Jørgensen and Marzouki, 2005). During WSIS, a number of organizations claimed that the issue of development (poverty reduction and economic and social development) was to take priority over human rights, especially in joint civil society documents. This perspective presupposes a distinction between development and human rights, rather than recognizing that the two are intimately related as was time and again stressed at the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights in 1993. The debate is a reminder of the fact that a number of civil society organizations do not see human rights as the normative foundation for any society, independent on the level of development, but rather as something secondary to issues of development.

On the other hand, many civil society organizations, specially from northern countries, show a rather restricted understanding of human rights, in that they may only consider, among the whole set of human rights, civil and political rights. Unlike the discussions around the right to communicate, this contradiction within civil society was not resolved by the end of WSIS. Although these two main controversies have largely evolved since then (Padovani et al., 2010; Jørgensen, 2013), especially through their reframing and reshaping taking into account the evolution of the technology and the economy, as well as other global transformations, they are still underpinning most of internet governance visions and debates, including the most recent ones. One of the strongest sign of their persistence is the foundation of the JustNet Coalition in 2014, as both a specific political stand and a detachment move from the BestBits coalition claims, notwithstanding BestBits' claim since its creation in 2012 to "not aim to present a single solution for ratification by the assembled groups, but rather to offer an open space where each group can present and advocate for the initiatives that they believe offer the best positive agenda for advancing broadly shared civil society interests in internet governance 11 ". There is no doubt that the internet Social Forum, expected to be held early 2016, will confirm the divergences. In the mean time, these controversies kept flourishing through debates on specific issues, such as the "right to internet access", suggested and advocated by different groups and coalitions as a new "digital right". internet Access: A Right In Its Own? In parallel to the WSIS debate on a right to communicate (which mainly took place amongst civil society actors), was a related but less politicized debate on internet access. In the early years of this debate, it mainly referred to technology infrastructure and the fact that the majority of the world population remain without such access, often referred to as the "the digital divide" although this is a highly contested notion, especially as it is trying to find technological solutions to problems that are essentially socioeconomic (Parayil, 2005; Pieterse, 2006; Wildermuth, 2010). Interestingly, in a context where the main economic actors were not anymore the major media corporations but rather the big internet intermediaries, this debate around internet access was framed differently from the right to communicate. Most notably, it had a more narrow and technical perspective on internet access, addressing it primarily as a matter of infrastructure (or lack hereof). This is not surprising since one of the main UN bodies dealing with WSIS was the ITU (tasked with telecommunication infrastructure), and since many government delegates struggled to make sense of the exact content of the information society Summit. Dealing with obvious inequalities in access to infrastructure including how to "roll out" more infrastructure was a concrete and less controversial topic than the socio--economic dynamics underlying these global differences. To put this into figures, as of 2014, of approximately 3 billion users, an estimated 78 percent reside in developed countries with great variations across regions. While Europe has an internet penetration rate of over 75 percent, less than one--fifth of African households are connected 12 . Although the developing countries have increased their internet penetration growth rate, they still represent 90 percent of the 4 billion people not yet connected to the internet13 . The lack of internet access for a majority of the world's population has since WSIS spurred a number of intergovernmental initiatives such as the International Telecommunications Union's 'Connect the World' initiative that seeks to provide access to ICT to some one billion people living in remote areas by 2015 14 . Moreover, it continues to be on the agenda of every internet Governance Forum. It is, however, increasingly addressed as a broader theme, paying attention to the many factors that enable participation in the digital domain. More recently, this debate has developed into proposals for a human right to internet access. The definition of such a new right is rather fuzzy, and not well defined -neither in concept nor scope. Global civil society networks such as the Association for Progressive Communication (APC) had started to frame internet access as a human right in their work on internet rights during the WSIS process, producing in 2006 the "APC internet Rights Charter 15 ". The document's name itself is worth noting: during WSIS where APC played a leading role in organizing civil society activities, the APC - a global network of organizations --was a member of both the CRIS Campaign and of the Human Rights Caucus. As such, the APC was well aware of the human rights vs. the right to communicate / communication rights controversy. The framing of its work related to rights in the online environment as "internet rights" allowed it to move on from this recurring debate. Yet, the need to incorporate the specifics of APC's vision and concern led the organization to keep a free hand with the international human rights framework, rather than strictly translating this framework in the online environment. As a matter of fact, the 2006 APC Charter claims not only for a "right to access", but for some even more unexpected "rights", such as "the right to open architecture", or "the right to the internet as an integrated whole". These proposed "rights" are neither precisely defined in the 2006 Charter, nor is it explained how they derive from international human rights standards. Although they are added to some of the established human rights, it becomes understandable why the framing of "internet rights" -rather than human rights --was preferred for this collection of claims, wishes or principles. This initial work was further elaborated in the process of developing the first version of the "IRPC Charter of Human Rights and Principles on the internet 16 ". The Charter was developed from 2009 onwards by the internet Rights and Principles Coalition (IRPC), a multi--stakeholder coalition formed at the IGF (Franklin, 2013: Chapter 5). Its first version was released by end 2010. The chosen approach, as recommended by the group of human rights experts having provided the first draft 17 , was to start from the UDHR, and to keep as close as possible to its defined rights and other provisions (only some obviously irrelevant in the context, such as that of Article 16 for instance, were not included). The Charter stresses the transformative nature of the internet not only to enable individuals to exercise their right to freedom of expression, but also to enjoy a range of other human rights, including the right to health, the right to education, the right to gender equality and so forth. It also goes beyond the rights stipulated in the international Bill of human rights, to incorporate, for instance, provisions on the right to development. The IRPC Charter does stipulate in its Article 1 a "Right to access the internet". However, its provisions make it clear how it is intended: "access to and use of the internet is increasingly indispensible for the full enjoyment of human rights, including [main UDHR rights listed]. Moreover, and as a parallel to the above comment on APC Charter's name, the IRPC Charter is that of "Rights and Principles on the internet" (italics is ours): not only does this clearly express the chosen approach of translating established (human) rights into the online environment, but also, when additions are made, they should be considered as "principles" rather than rights. This particularly applies when the Charter refers to the internet technical design principles to express the importance of not altering them in order to realize some of the human rights. As a matter of fact, the Charter comes with some explanatory statements, one of them being "What do we mean by human rights and principles?". In 2011, the debate on internet access as a human right was fueled by a number of media outlets that mistakenly claimed that Frank La Rue (at the time UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression) had declared such a right. In fact, what La Rue had recommended was to make universal internet access a priority for all states [START_REF][END_REF] . The rapporteur appreciated that this could not be instantly 16 See http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/site/charter/ 17 Especially since some of them directed or contributed to a previous effort of translating human rights into the information society context (Jørgensen, 2006) [START_REF][END_REF] See Paragraph 86 of Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, A/HRC/17/27 (16 May 2012). Available at: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf achieved because of, for example, deficient electricity access 19 . Nevertheless, States are positively obliged to promote or enable the means necessary for individuals to exercise their freedom of expression. Also, once the infrastructure has been established, policies and strategies should be adopted which make the internet widely available, accessible and affordable for all. Similarly, the first UN "Resolution on the promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the internet" adopted in July 2012 20 does not recognize a right to internet access. Nor does it prescribe any universal service provision, or suggest revising existing peering and transit agreements in order to make internet access universally affordable. The resolution does, however, stress the freedom to access the internet and includes a "call upon all States to promote and facilitate access to the internet and international cooperation aimed at the development of media and information and communication facilities in all countries". Likewise, the UN Human Rights Committee in its general comment on freedom of expression considers that internet--based modes of expression are protected and that States should accordingly adopt all necessary steps to ensure access to the internet 21 . Actually several countries -especially within Europe --have already stipulated universal internet access in national legislation 22 . The EU Universal Service Directive amended in 2009 (2009/136/EC) stresses that everyone within the EU must be able to access a minimum set of electronic communication services of good quality and at an affordable price. Also, all reasonable requests for connection at a fixed location to a public communication network must be met by at least one operator 23 . In a highly debated newspaper article from January 2012, Vincent Cerf - a key figure in the technical community around internet governance -argued against a human right to access the internet. Cerf's main concern is that 19 Ibid. Paragraph 66 20 UNGA Resolution A/HRC/20/L.13, adopted in June 2012. Available at: http://daccess--dds--ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/G12/147/10/PDF/G1214710.pdf 21 See Un Human Rights Committee General Comment No. 34 on Article 19: Freedoms of opinion and expression. Available at : http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrc/docs/gc34.pdf 22 Examples include the Estonian Telecommunication Act (2000), a ruling by the French Constitutional Court (2009), Amendment to the Finish Communication Market Act (2010), a ruling by the Costa Rican Constitutional Court (2010), and an amendment to the Spanish Act on sustainable economy (2011). For further details please refer to Pollicino and Bassini (2011: 29) 23 See section 1 of the Code of EU Online Rights, which is based on the Universal Service Directive technology is an enabler, not a right in itself: "There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom for torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any technology in this exalted category24 ". In response, proponents of this new right argued that access to the internet is a precondition for enjoying a number of other human rights and should therefore be considered a right on its own merits 25 . In line with this, a BBC survey amongst 27 000 people in 26 different countries in 2010 showed that four out of five believed internet access to be a basic human right 26 . Most recently, the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly have adopted a resolution on the right to internet access. The resolution stresses the need for universal service requirements on internet access throughout Europe and beyond, and iterates that everyone shall have the right to internet access as an essential requirement for exercising rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. In consequence, "States should recognize the fundamental right to internet access in law and in practice" 27 . On a more cautious note (and practically at the same time), the Council of Europe´s Committee of Ministers has adopted a Recommendation on a Guide for Human Rights of internet users 28 . The Guide itself heavily relies on the above--mentioned IPRC Charter (the Council of Europe has been a member of the multi--stakeholder IRPC coalition; and the committee of experts that was set up to draft the Recommendation, including the Guide as its Annex, included several IRPC members that were involved in developing the Charter). The Guide thus translates existing human rights standards to the online environment, and provides important guidance as to how the European human rights system assesses the scope of each right. Concerning access to the internet, this is addressed in the first section of the Guide (together with the principle of non discrimination), but not as a right in its own merit. As stated in the presentation to the Guide: "The guide does not establish new human rights and fundamental freedoms. It builds on existing human rights standards and enforcement mechanisms". This formulation derives from the terms of references for the committee of experts set up to develop the Guide, and was a requirement from the Council of Europe member states: contrarily to the Parliamentary Assembly, member states did not want to engage in the politically sensitive process of defining new human rights, especially in an instrument carrying a higher level of commitment than a Resolution. A final example of developments around internet access relates to industry-driven initiatives such as Facebook's internet.org project that aims "to connect the two third´s of the world that doesn't have internet access" 29 . The initiative is a partnership between the social media platform and a number of ICT companies such as Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung, and provides users with a Facebook--defined internet platform. When presenting the project, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asserted 30 : "connectivity is a human right". Since its launch in 2013, the initiative has been criticized by civil society (not least in India and Brazil) for violating net neutrality and for Facebook's role as gatekeeper in determining what websites users of internet.org may access. In particular, a number of NGOs sent an open letter 31 to Facebook to express their opinion on this initiative. As one of the signatory organizations commented, they considered that "internet.org comes with too many strings attached 32 ". Following these critiques, Facebook rebranded 33 its initiative in September 2015 into "Free Basics", and added some new services to it. On a related note is Google's Loon project 34 that was launched in 2013 with the aim of providing internet access to rural and remote areas. The project uses high--altitude balloons to create an aerial wireless network, and have users connect to the network via a special antenna attached to their building. Unlike internet.org, the project has so far been well received.

In sum, while a right to internet access has been widely promoted and debated, it seems fair to conclude that a (positive) human right to access the internet is not established under international human rights law (Tully, 2014; Land, 2013). Rather, a negative state obligation (not to interfere with the means of communication, nor the content) is established as part of 29 See www.internet.org 30 Zuckerberg, Mark (August 20, 2013). "Is Connectivity a Human Right?", available at: https://www.facebook.com/isconnectivityahumanright/isconnectivityahumanright.pdf 31 NGOs "Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg Regarding internet.org, Net Neutrality, Privacy and Security". May 18, 2015. Available on many signatories websites, e.g. at: https://cippic.ca/uploads/LT_Facebook_re_internet_org--20150518.pdf 32 See https://cippic.ca/en/news/facebooks_internet_dot_org_has_too_many_strings_attached 33 See Facebook announcement at : http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/09/update-to-internet-org-free-basic-services/ 34 See http://www.google.com/loon freedom of expression (Hopkins, 2010; See also ECHR case--law). For example, critique of government interference with individuals internet access routinely features in State Party reports, Concluding Observations and General Comments emanating from the UN human rights committees (see the many examples highlighted in Tully 2014). Also, as argued by La Rue and others giving effect to the right to freedom of expression imposes a positive obligation upon States to promote and facilitate universal internet access 35 . In this sense, the human rights framework may help rectify deficient internet access and ensure greater equality for deprived groups, thus using the moral authority of the human rights discourse to commit states to prioritize this area (Tully, 2014: p. 189). Arguably, internet access is an enabler for most - if not all -- human rights, and thereby relates to societal participation in the broadest sense. Individuals access the internet for multiple purposes, including education, healthcare, community services, commerce and entertainment. As such, internet access has a range of political, economic, social and cultural dimensions. Moreover, its importance in relation to a number of existing rights has been widely recognized by the UN human rights system. In contrast, the call for a new human right to access the internet seems unlikely to succeed. The fundamental rights that make up international human right law was formulated and agreed upon at a specific point in time (post second world war), and many commentators have warned that if those rights were to be renegotiated in the political climate of today, they would be weakened rather than strengthened. Moreover, since the importance of internet access and internet freedoms increasingly is recognized and accommodated as part of existing freedoms and rights related to opinion, expression, privacy, association, cultural participation, etc., the real challenge seems rather to be the effective realization of these rights. In consequence, as access becomes more widespread, the debate may turn back to the themes raised by the proponents of the right to communicate, such as whether or not the internet is enabling a more diverse and decentralized public debate and participation. Also, one should be cautious by industry attempts to use the global inequality to promote platform--specific internet access as exemplified above, for instance by the internet.org project. Rather than promoting human rights such initiatives may lead to disempowerment and capture of said communities into specific platforms of content, as opposed to an open internet. Moreover, the US Government announced in late September 2015 to the UN General Assembly its Global Connect Initiative36 . In a nutshell, the initiative consists in making internet access a top priority of all US aid and development agencies worldwide operations, and of engaging international development banks to adopt the same objective. Most notably, the USG statement explicitly mentioned that it "will work with private industry which has created innovative solutions to connect people in remote areas". The implications of these private initiatives and public--private partnerships, including how these developments may change the culture of human rights from a zone of contestation ("power regulator") to a realm of industry--driven Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, may have significant consequences in the long run. The corporate framing of human rights may impact not only on specific rights such as freedom of expression and information, but may have a broader impact on the effective protection of these rights in the online realm.

Introducing a Conflict of Rights: To Be Or Not To Be Forgotten?

The "right to be forgotten" (RtBF) (or "right to oblivion" as it is sometimes referred to) has been one of the most contentious and debated human rights issues in the past five years, dividing proponents of online privacy and freedom of expression, respectively. Although this controversy was initiated in and largely concerns Europe (and, to the extent that it concerns Google, an American company, the US), we include it in this paper for three reasons: first, other regions of the world have shown considerable interest in this debate (for instance through workshops at the IGF or at some of the regional or national internet governance fora); second, it perfectly illustrates one of the consequences of introducing new rights: that of creating a hard to resolve and quasi--systematic conflicts of rights; third, its unfolding are likely to inform future discussions on the regulation of all sorts of internet platforms operating globally in various sectors (from social networks to the so--called "Uberised" or "sharing" economy and society). This carries many still unresolved challenges for policy decisions, all being highly sensitive in terms of sovereignty and other political, legal, economic, social, cultural and societal choices. One of these main crosscutting challenges is the need to channel and maintain good governance values, including the respect of human rights and social justice, as well as democracy and the rule of law. This is a particularly difficult to address challenge, with private US firms, such as the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) and other giants, dominating the internet market. In the following, we will thus outline and discuss some of the key moments in the RtBF debate, focusing in particular on the way it challenges human rights standards and the rule of law. The framing of a right to be forgotten started in Brussels amongst European policy makers and attached experts around 2009 with the publication of Viktor Mayer--Schönberger´s book "Delete -- The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age" (2009). In January 2012, the European Commission published the Proposal for a Regulation on the Protection of Individuals with Regard to the Processing of Personal Data and on the Free Movement of Such Data ("GDPR"), which updates the current Data Protection Directive from 1995 (95/46/EC). The GDPR is expected to enter into force in 2016, and will instantly become law throughout the European Union. The GDPR has been widely interpreted as to provide all European Union citizens a "right to be forgotten", by giving the individual a right to have his or her personal data removed from the web. This interpretation is based on Article 17 of the initial GPDR proposal 37 providing for a right for data subjects to request erasure of their personal data as well as the abstention from further dissemination. Article 17 establishes the criteria for when a data subject can have personal data removed, data controllers' obligation to erase links to third--party websites, and how to exercise that right. While this initially proposed Article 17 is explicitly entitled "Right to be forgotten and to erasure", the extent to which it actually provides for a new right and corresponding duties has been contested amongst activists, scholars and regulators. As stressed by van Hoboken (2014), when examining the EC proposal for the data protection reform from January 2012, arguably, there is no such thing as a new right to get data deleted in the proposed Article 17: "The proposal adds a lot of text but doesn't add that much substantively in comparison to the current DPD framework. The situations in which erasure or the abstention of further dissemination of personal data would have to be granted by the controller depend on the rules of the legitimate grounds for processing and the interpretation of rules on purpose limitation. If the basic principles for the fair and lawful processing of 37 See EC Communication COM(2012)11 of 25 January 2012 on a "Proposal for a REGULATION OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (General Data Protection Regulation)", available at: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/document/review2012/com_2012_11_en.pdf personal data are not strengthened in the Regulation, there is no ground to speak of an actual new 'right' to be forgotten or erasure" (van Hoboken, 2014). Later in the process, the European Parliament compromise amendments, adopted in March 2014, removed the 'right to be forgotten' from the text of the Regulation but seem to strengthen the right to erasure in some respects. For instance, the right to have links, copies or replication of data deleted has been more clearly stipulated and has been included in Article 17(1) along with an additional ground to obtain the right to erasure, namely in case of a decision by court or regulatory authority based in the Union 38 . Since the introduction of the GDPR proposal, the "right to be forgotten" has been subject to intense public debate in Europe as well as in the United States, and concern has been raised as to its negative impact on freedom of expression. Similar to the data protection directive, the GDPR strives to balance privacy and freedom of expression by presenting freedom of expression as a limitation on the right to have personal data erased. According to Article 80(2) of the GDPR proposal, it is up to each member state to determine what to include in the freedom of expression exception after the GDPR enters into force. On this backdrop, the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on Google Spain v. AEPD in May 2014 39 was seen by many commentators as reading a "right to be forgotten" into the currently in force Data Protection Directive. The court's decision recognized the right of a Spanish citizen to have personal data about his insolvency dereferenced so that this information would not appear in response to a search for his name in a search engine. The Court classified Google as a controller of personal data and thereby subject to the Data Protection Directive and responsible for removal of the information.

Google and a large number of scholars and activists have consistently warned that the expansiveness of the right to be forgotten as conceptualized by the CJEU and the EU Commission will violate the right to freedom of expression and contribute to rewrite history on the internet.

The Google Spain decision led to a flood of reactions in the media, particularly in the United States 40 . In the public debate, the Google Spain Decision has been widely referred to as the right to be forgotten ruling, and its implications for freedom of expression and access to information intensively discussed amongst both industry, regulators, academics and civil society. Former EC Vice--President Viviane Reding have publicly defended the right to be forgotten, both when introducing the GDPR 41 and in response to the Google Spain decision 42 ; newspapers around the world have stated that in Europe people will now be granted the right to have their data deleted 43 , and it has turned out to be one of the most debated topics in scholarship related to the reform of the European data protection regulation 44 . In his Opinion dated 14 January 2011, the then European Data Protection Supervisor, Peter Hustinx, has stressed that in the online domain economic forces work against the individuals' right to privacy, hence there is a need to strengthen the request for data deletion: "from an economic perspective, it is more costly for a data controller to delete data than to keep them stored. The exercise of the rights of the individual therefore goes against the natural economic trend [START_REF]Attitudes on Data Protection and Electronic Identity in the European Union[END_REF] ". An EU official involved in the development of the GDPR proposal has stressed that "freedom of expression is not a good argument for not having a right to be forgotten" (Rustad and Kulevska, 2015: p 373). Others have argued that the GDPR and the Google Spain ruling merely updates principles that are already part of the European data protection regime, and does not introduce substantially new rights. Generally speaking, there is strong support for a right to be forgotten in Europe. A European Commission study concluded that seventy--five percent of Europeans favor such a right 46 . involved industry (Google and other search engines), as well as a wide array of US scholars, academics, and free speech advocates. Commentators have warned that the right to be forgotten will lead to censorship of the internet because individuals can request search engines or websites to erase personal data, which may rewrite history [START_REF]Foggy Thinking About the Right to Oblivion[END_REF] . In a widely cited blog post from March 2011, Peter Fleischer, chief privacy counsel of Google, notes that the right to be forgotten, as discussed in Europe, covers three separate categories, each of which proposes progressively greater threats to free speech 48 . Others argue that if content becomes less searchable on the internet, it will "derogate the role of counter--speech" and "disrupt the natural process of communication" (Larson, 2013). As stated by some scholars, the right to be forgotten should not subordinate freedom of expression because free and open public access enables citizens to discuss and share information about society (Rustad and Kulevska, 2015: p 373). In response to the ruling, Google have established an Advisory Council on the right to be forgotten, and have held meetings in a number of European cities to raise their concerns. An important part of the critique pertain to the enforcement of the right, stressing that the CJEU ruling provides no guidance as to how data controllers are to determine when data that is the subject of an erasure request is no longer necessary or where there is no legal basis for retaining it. Consequently, the burden falls on the data controller to determine those factors, placing Google and other search engines in the position of gatekeepers that determine which data deletion requests should be granted and which should be denied. In November 2014, the Article 29 Working Party Guidelines published Guidelines to address this concern 49 . The Guidelines provide recommendations to European Data Protection Authorities on how they should address complaints received by individuals after Google denied them their de--referencing request; On 18 June 2015, the Article 29 Working Party published a first evaluation survey 50 of such complaints. In its report of February 2015 51 , Google's Advisory Council on the right to be forgotten recommended more transparency, underlining that data controllers should be as transparent as possible by providing anonymized and aggregated statistics as well as the process and criteria used in de--referencing decisions. Beyond the benefits to users that request content removed and the wider public, transparency might help search engines shape implementation guidelines and reveal aspects of the legal framework that require clarification. Another challenge is that the right to delete may vary depending on the EU member state, or between EU and other countries, in case the right to be forgotten will eventually be expanded beyond EU member states. As a matter of fact, a first conflict recently arose between the CNIL (the French Data Protection Authority and current Chair of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party) and Google. In view of a global extension of the right to be forgotten, the CNIL ordered Google to apply de-referencing on all domain names of the search engine, not only restricting its application to search results available in the European domain 52 . On July 30, Google expressed its disagreement on the CNIL's interpretation of the CJEU ruling, asking it to withdraw its formal notice 53 , arguing against such a "troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the web". On 21 September 2015, the CNIL rejected [START_REF][END_REF] Google's request, which may lead to a financial sanction of a maximum of 150 000 euros against the company. Interestingly, Google's arguments to deny the application of the RtBF beyond the French jurisdiction are based on freedom of expression, freedom of information and the competence of jurisdictions, while the CNIL remains consistent with considering Google as a data controller, in line with the CJEU ruling. In sum, the discourse against the right to be forgotten has primarily been driven by US scholars, free speech activists, Google and other industry actors. The Google Spain ruling has been framed as a threat to freedom of expression while its relationship to existing data protection regulation has largely been ignored in the public debate. This is not to say that the actual implementation of the decision is not problematic. From a rule of law perspective, it places private actors as judges of which content to remove the crutch of a "right to collect and use big data". At present, this development is promoted both from the industry that strive on big data, and from experts and some data protection authorities (including inside the EU) that advocate for replacing restrictions on data collection with limitations on data use (Mayer--Schönberger and Cukier, 2013). Such a trend might well undermine the principle of purpose limitation, which is one of the cardinal principles of data protection in Europe.

Conclusion

When considering some of the broader human rights implications of the proposals and developments outlined here, and despite the differences in character and context of the considered examples, some interrelated tendencies seem to emerge, or to confirm trends previously identified in the literature on self--or co--regulation (Frydman, 2004; Marzouki, 2008). First, we see a shift in how human rights are envisaged and debated, from the traditional focus on state obligations and state enforcement (hard law) to an increasing involvement and call upon private companies to take a role in the realization of some human rights (e.g. through charity actions, participation in soft law development, and through codes of conducts and other corporate social responsibility initiatives). The human rights language is being used (captured) by a variety of actors to promote specific interests, often with limited reflection on human rights as a set of international legal norms, with inherent zones of conflicts (e.g. protection of individuals against abuse of power, commitments to certain standards in society). This shift in the human rights discourse from state obligations to corporate initiatives seems to reflect the nature of the online environment with private actors in control of core infrastructure and services, yet it is extending and its implications for the protection of individuals is troublesome and have not been subject to sufficient substantial analysis yet. Second, the post WSIS era has witnessed a regression of the concerns related to socio--economic and development (or collective) rights, and an increasing focus on civil and political rights, particularly freedom of expression and privacy, i.e. individual rights (Brousseau and Marzouki, 2012). As mentioned, the legacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is among others due to its specific place in history and the way it stresses the universality and interrelation between civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights. Increasingly, different actors "pick up" "their" right of interest, with limited attention to the overall framework and the interdependence between the full architecture of rights. Also, the idea of

See http://internetsocialforum.net/isf/?page_id=832

See http://internetsocialforum.net/isf/?page_id=848

The Forum was co--organized by, among others, the CRIS campaign and the Human Rights Caucus as a side event to the WSIS Summit in Geneva in 2003. See the web site at: http://www.communicationrights.org/

See http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=47729#.VdM40lyTKI1

See http://www.itu.int/en/ITU--D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2014-e.pdf

 14 See the International Telecommunication Union, Connect the World, available at: www.itu.int/ITU--D/

connect 15 See https://www.apc.org/en/node/5677/

This Op--Ed published by Vint Cerf in the New York Times on 4 January 2012 is available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/opinion/internet--access--is--not--a-human--right.html

Joint Declaration on Freedom of Expression and the internet by the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, the OAS Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and the ACHPR Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information, 1 June 2011, at para 6. Available (inter alia) at: http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/expression/showarticle.asp?artID=849

See the USG announcement at : http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2015/09/247374.htm

from the public domain (de-- referencing), and which to leave up. This form of privatized law enforcement is part of a more general trend towards "self-regulation", where the private actors in control of the internet's infrastructure and core services are tasked with enforcing public policy, without a public mandate. In practical terms, the task of assessing numerous deletion requests may lead to overbroad implementation, not least from less resourceful search engines. Also, as pointed to by the NGO European Digital Rights 55 , Google and other search engines already remove content, for example, when they enforce the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act --without similar freedom of expression concerns --and Google has even granted a "right to be forgotten" for victims of "revenge porn", without restricting its application to Europe 56 . Yet, the freedom of expression and rule of law concerns related to these practices have not received similar attention in the public debate. Arguably, the right to have personal data deleted as presented in the GDPR in its present form is indeed bound with limitations that put into perspective the risks for freedom of expression. Yet, one may fear for future developments and the lobbying by some states. One challenge relates to the fuzziness of the notion and the potential expansion of the right. In France, for example, some members of Parliaments insisted to demand that this right be extended to a right to delete content that others have published on one user, especially young users. This would mark a slippery slope towards privatized censorship. If the intention is primarily to extend the data subject rights towards a right to informational self--determination, the Council of Europe approach may be a better way forward - as exemplified with the modernization process of Convention 108, including new provisions to strengthen the rights of the data subject 57 . One of the main risks with unclear and politicized notions such as the right to be forgotten is that it may lead to a change of paradigm, especially in the current context of big data, data mining, and profiling. In this new paradigm, limits on data collection based on purpose would no longer be the default, nor would the principle of data minimization. Rather, the default would become the collection of large amounts of data, with some provisions as a guarantee for control of their use, to the extent that this control can still be reasonably exercised. Although this may seem like an exaggeration, the right to be forgotten can become the fragile companion, or 55 See https://edri.org/forgotten/ 56 See https://edri.org/google--admits--it--was--wrong--on--right--to--be--forgotten/ 57 See http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/standardsetting/dataprotection/modernisation_fr.asp inventing new rights (as with the right to internet access) seems to ignore that Conventions are living instruments, and that their standards are expected to be translated their standards into current situations, taking into account technical and socio--economic developments. . Considered as a whole, these observations indicate a profound redefinition, in the digital sphere, mainly through procedural transformations of existing legislation and regulation, of the legacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In future work, we wish to explore in more details the hypothesis that this transformation is closely related to the fact that the internet is governed mainly by private actors, that sometimes conflict with state regulations (e.g. in the field of data protection as analyzed here in the case of the right to be forgotten), but other times converge with them as to the means and methods (e.g. through big data mining, algorithmic regulation), and objectives (e.g. profiling and targeting behaviors).


Nassime Blin

Michel Taïx

Philippe Fillatreau

Jean-Yves Fourquet

Interactive Motion Planning with Contact

This work deals with planning processes for the assistance to manipulation in order to simulate industrial tasks such as assembly, maintenance or disassembly in Virtual Reality. This paper presents a novel interactive path planning algorithm with contact based on an RRT-Connect approach.

First, we propose a real-time interactive planner where both a computer and a human operator can simultaneously search the workspace therefore largely speeding up the process. An authority sharing parameter can control the autonomy of the computer.

Then we present a novel contact space algorithm able of sampling on the surface of obstacles. This method helps finding paths in cluttered environments or solving specific contact tasks such as insertion or sliding operations. We finish by presenting the results of our interactive path planner with contact through two examples showing significant improvement over usual methods in both free and contact space.

I. INTRODUCTION

Our goal is to plan a motion for an industrial part which will be called object in the rest of this paper. Using widely known motion planners we can find a solution to theses problems.

Probabilistic planners such as RRT can be very slow to solve problems in difficult spaces such as cluttered or narrow passages. Therefore, we can use the help of a human operator to solve the planning problem faster. Often humans can find a path very fast or see that a passage is impossible almost instantaneously. On the opposite a human alone may look a long time for a path in an impossible passage because the navigation on the six dimensional space (position and orientation) is difficult. This is why we believe that combining both the computational power of an automatic planner and the capacity of a human operator can be rewarding for planning the motion of an object. Some industrial need surfaces of obstacles to be fully used and for planning processes in opposition to standard motion planning where avoiding obstacles is the objective. Assembly itself means getting objects to touch each other. Industrial examples may be sliding operations or insertion scenarios [START_REF] Iacob | Assembly/disassembly analysis and modeling techniques: A review[END_REF], [START_REF] Bordegoni | Evaluation of a haptic-based interaction system for virtual manual assembly[END_REF], [START_REF] Tching | Interactive simulation of cad models assemblies using virtual constraint guidance[END_REF]. We believe that in theses cases, contact planning would require less nodes and time to find a solution path.

This paper is organized as follows : in section I a survey of motion planners related to our work is presented. Section II introduces our interactive algorithm. A novel contact algorithm is then presented in Section III. Section IV is A. Path Planning Among all different types of motion planners, we will here discuss only sampling based algorithms. These algorithms rely on the fact that they have probabilistic completeness. The two most used methods are the Probabilistic Roadmap Method (PRM) [START_REF] Kavraki | Probabilistic roadmaps for path planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces[END_REF] and the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree algorithm (RRT) [START_REF] Kuffner | Rrt-connect: An efficient approach to single-query path planning[END_REF]. They have been extensively studied [START_REF] Lavalle | Planning algorithms[END_REF] and an excellent survey is available [START_REF] Hsu | On the probabilistic foundations of probabilistic roadmap planning[END_REF]. There exist real-time algorithms such as [START_REF] Naderi | Rt-rrt: a real-time path planning algorithm based on rrt[END_REF] but they are not interactive because tree expansion is not controlled by an operator. We focused our work on RRT because it is a faster solution than PRM, growing faster in constrained environments.

B. Interactive Planning

Here is presented a survey of interactive motion planning algorithms that share path finding between an algorithm and a human operator.

In [START_REF] Bayazit | Enhancing randomized motion planners: Exploring with haptic hints[END_REF] the authors present a method for cooperation between human and automatic motion planner. Forces of haptic device can guide and improve the interaction between them [START_REF] Rosell | Motion planning for haptic guidance[END_REF]. In other works, the user interaction can be made by a haptically controlled object to modify or define critical object configurations [START_REF] He | Haptic-aided robot path planning based on virtual tele-operation[END_REF].

Ladevèze introduced an interactive planner [START_REF] Ladeveze | Haptic assembly and disassembly task assistance using interactive path planning[END_REF]. A linear interpolation between the current configuration and the goal configuration generates an attraction force guiding a user through a haptic device.

Flavigné [START_REF] Flavigné | Interactive motion planning for assembly tasks[END_REF] introduced the Interactive RRT (IRRT). Its goal is to move an object in free space. This solution lets an operator control the sampling process using a haptic arm.

More recently, Cailhol [START_REF] Cailhol | A hierarchic approach for path planning in virtual reality[END_REF] implemented an original multilayered interactive solution. In two steps, he finds a topologic path in the environment and then finds a precise path using geometric information to control an object. Both of theses phases are controlled according to semantic information.

C. Contact Planning

Classically, the goal of motion planning is to move an object in the free space C f ree of a workspace trying to avoid obstacles. Our goal is to plan motion at the surface of obstacles.

Redon [START_REF] Redon | Practical local planning in the contact space[END_REF] published a solution to locally plan on contact. When an in-contact configuration is found, the next generated node is projected on a set of valid variations. This set satisfies all global non collision constraints. The main drawback of this method is that it is not global and its goal is not to plan in contact but rather to get out of it after the first iteration.

Rodriguez [START_REF] Rodriguez | An obstaclebased rapidly-exploring random tree[END_REF] uses obstacle based information to generate configurations parallel to obstacles. This helps expanding PRM graphs in cluttered environments in a much better way than a standard PRM. Though this solution plans parallel to obstacles, it still cannot plan in contact.

Yu Yan [START_REF] Yan | Integrating user to minimize assembly path planning time in plm[END_REF] proposed a very efficient contact planning solution using a retraction technique. That is, an operator with a device draws a path allowed to have colliding parts. This path is then locally retracted to the surface in a post treatment to generate contact paths.

D. Contribution

To the best of our knowledge, there exist no interactive algorithm capable of searching the whole workspace and able to plan directly on surfaces. Therefore we have implemented a RRT interactive in contact algorithm. Our contribution is twofold: an in-contact solution without any post treatment coupled with an interactive algorithm greatly speeding up motion planning processes.

II. INTERACTIVE MOTION PLANNING

This section describes our interactive algorithm and it implementation details. We will show how can a usual RRT be used with the help of an operator.

A. The computer loop

The computer loop is a classic RRT-connect algorithm implemented in Hpp framework [START_REF] Lamiraux | Hpp: a new software framework for manipulation planning[END_REF]. At each iteration, the algorithm tries to extend the roadmap in direction of a new random configuration. If the edge between the new configuration and the closest node of the roadmap lies in the free space, the new node is then added to the roadmap.

B. The human loop

Our solution uses an interactive device : a six degrees of freedom mouse.

The human loop consists in a moving object controlled by the mouse. The configuration q device is the geometric center of the object's root body. This value is defined by the operator. Both the edges and the nodes of the roadmap can be displayed in a viewer, see figure 1. In this example, only operator configurations are displayed. The presented solution lets an RRT-connect algorithm work with an operator using an interactive device through the visualization of the roadmap.

The interactivity factor α lets the user define the authority sharing between the operator and the computer. It represents the probability to have a computer authority. If α = 1 this means the planner is fully automatic whereas if α = 0 it is fully manual. Thanks to this factor, we can avoid the following problematic cases : an algorithm spending all its time searching in uninteresting places or an operator trying to pass through an impossible passage.

Algorithm 1 Interactive Planning

Require: W, T, α, q device 1: loop

2:
a ← rand(0, 1)

3: if a > α then 4:
q current ← q device 5:

T ← Add Tree(q current ) 6:

else 7:
q current ← Random Shooter()

T ← Add Tree(q current ) 9:

end if 10: end loop

The algorithm 1 presents our interactive path planner. It uses as an input the workspace W , the tree T , the variable α and the configuration q device . Line 2 a random number a between 0 and 1 is picked. Depending on the value of a, this means the tree is extended sometimes in a random direction and sometimes in the direction pointed by the human operator in the workspace.

If a > α line 4, the extension is chosen in direction of the user defined configuration q device given by the interactive device. We set the variable q current to equal q device . Line 5 the tree is extended in the direction of q current . This is done by getting the nearest node q near to q current in the tree T . The q near to q current path is discretely validated as collision-free. Whenever an obstacle is met along this path, we name q new the last valid configuration, add it to the roadmap and the q near to q new path is also added as a valid edge to the roadmap.

Line 7 in case a ≤ α, we set q current to equal a configuration obtained with a random shooter and add it to the tree T

III. CONTACT PLANNING

We will present in this section our novel in contact motion planner capable of sampling at the surface of obstacles. The overall behavior is first explained before presenting our sampling method. Then we give an example of contact sampling. Last we introduce our interactive motion planner in contact which is our main contribution.

A. Nearest Obstacle

We have models of both the environment and the object describing their geometry. A user moves the object in the workspace using an interactive device and whenever he approaches an obstacle sufficiently, the planner switches in contact mode at the surface of this obstacle. Moving the object away from the obstacle ends contact mode.

Using a collision detection library, we can measure the obstacle-object distance for every obstacle. The closest obstacle is then defined as the contact obstacle.

B. Stay in Contact

Starting contact mode, the planner samples on a local tangent plane to the nearest obstacle.

For each of these samples, the actual orientation of the object is chosen by the operator and kept constant during contact allowing only translations. New configurations are randomly chosen along the tangent plane. The object is then able to slide on the obstacles to enhance sampling in specific environments.

When the object switch to contact mode, a predefined number of contact samples are added to the tree. We chose this behavior because we want to multiply contact configurations to search more interesting space. Also, as the space may be cluttered, the probability to sample a node in collision is high leading to more rejected in-collision nodes. We are then tempted to sample a high amount of nodes on the surface.

The algorithm quits contact mode after sampling the predefined number of nodes; then the position of the operator is checked. If he hasn't moved or if he stayed close to an obstacle, the algorithm enters back to contact mode.

C. Contact Algorithm Overview

The algorithm 2 presents our novel in-contact algorithm. It uses as an input the contact point on the obstacle P o , the nearest point of the object P n , the configuration q device which is the geometric center of the object's root body and the variable N describing the number of contact samples each time entering contact mode. This configuration is driven by a human operator who is able to see all the scene.

Algorithm 2 Contact Sampling

Require: P o , P n , N, q device 1: (δ, R) ← Find Local Frame(P o , P n , q device ) 2: for i < N do 3:

q current ← Contact Shooter(R, δ) 4:
T ← Add tree(q current ) 5: end for Line 1, a call to Find Local Frame function returns δ the distance to contact and R the rotation matrix that is the transformation from the local to the global frame.

The function first finds the normal vector to the obstacle n = Pn-Po ||Pn-Po|| . The configuration given by the operator is the geometric center of the root body with P c the 3D point attached to it. Therefore, P c = q device . We project the vector P n to P c on n and compute δ the projected distance to contact:

δ = n t .(P n -P c )n Pn P o P c n δ Π Fig. 2: 2D Projection example
We then find a rotation matrix between the world frame and the frame attached to P c . Using n and Gram-Schmidt process [START_REF] Schmidt | Über die auflösung linearer gleichungen mit unendlich vielen unbekannten[END_REF] we can generate a local frame of three orthonormalized vectors (i, j, n). These vectors give R the rotation matrix from the local to world frame.

R = GramSchmidt(n)
Line 2 starts an iteration of N contact samples. They are computed line 3 calling the function Contact Shooter(). Instead of randomly shooting every six dimensions like a random shooter would do, we position the rotation to follow the operator's order. Finally we randomly shoot the two last free dimensions and return the values in q current . The position coordinates t of q current are rotated using R and translated using δ to stay on the contact plan. This transformation keeps shooting configurations on the plane Π passing through P c and perpendicular to n inside the bounds of the workspace.

q current = Rt + δ
Line 4, the result is added to the tree for expansion.

D. Interactive Motion Planning with Contact

The real interest of our work and our main contribution is when both previous methods are used simultaneously. We can benefit both from an automated planner searching the whole space and the operator seeking to guide or slide the object.

We will show how contact samples can be generated on obstacle surfaces when an operator approaches them. We decided to let the operator define with his interactive device which surfaces should be sampled because he has the industrial knowledge. On the opposite, we chose to let the computer sample on surfaces because it is very difficult for an operator to be precise. This behavior allows the operator to decide manually when to start and end contact mode and on which surface. Previous contact algorithms (see section I) had costly contact solutions, opposite to our method who can generate many contact samples quickly. Algorithm 3 presents the two methods combined.

For each sample, a random number a defines who holds authority. If a ≤ α, authority is given to the computer and a random configuration is shot. If a > α, authority is given to the operator. In this case, a distance test defines if contact mode should be enabled. If the test fails the new configuration is the one given by the interactive device ; if the test succeeds it means that the operator is very close to an obstacle, N contact samples are generated on its surface.

Line 2, we cycle through all elements in the workspace using Find Nearest Obstacle() function to measure the distance between them and the object. This function returns the pair of nearest points : P o the nearest point on an obstacle to P n the nearest point on the object.

Line 3, a random number between 0 and 1 is shot. If a > α line 4, control is given to the operator. Otherwise, line 11, the computer works alone.

Let d be a fixed threshold, line 5. If the distance between the object and the obstacle is higher than this parameter, the node q current added to the tree is set to qdevice, line 6.

If the distance is lower or equal to d, the planner switches to contact mode, line 9. The function ContactSampling() which is algorithm 2 is called.

Algorithm 3 Interactive RRT with Contact

Require: W, T, N, q device , α, d

(P o , P n ) = Find Nearest Obstacle(q device ) 3:

a ← rand(0,

if a > α then 5:

if |P c -P n | ≥ d then 6:
q current ← q device 7:

T ← Add Tree(q current ) 8: q current ← Random Shooter() 13:

T ← Add Tree(q current ) 14:

end if 15: end loop

E. Example

Here is described an example of our interactive motion planner on a surface. We have a white L shaped object that has to slide on a plane. Both nodes and edges are displayed.

The α parameter describing the authority sharing between the random shooter and the operator shooter is set to 1. This means that the only samples kept in the roadmap will be non colliding user defined configurations and valid contact configurations when in contact mode. This helps observing the behavior of our contact sampler on its own without the help of an standard RRT. When entering contact mode, the number N of configurations to be shot before switching back to normal mode is fixed to 10 for the rest of the paper.

We can see figure 3 two steps of motion planning with different orientations. Starting in position (1), we move the Fig. 3: Contact example object to the contact and stay a while in this position to sample a lot of nodes all aligned [START_REF] Bordegoni | Evaluation of a haptic-based interaction system for virtual manual assembly[END_REF]. Please note that the nodes display the position of P c . Step (3) gets out of the contact, rotate the object (4) and get back to contact. A new set of points with the different orientation are generated [START_REF] Kuffner | Rrt-connect: An efficient approach to single-query path planning[END_REF].

We have implemented a novel motion planner capable of generating configurations at the surface of obstacles with the help of an operator. Our choice was to let the operator impose the orientation because this can be important in some industrial cases such as insertion but there may be other strategies. We illustrate in the following section the usefulness of our contact algorithm with two examples.

IV. IMPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS

The following section describes the performances of our algorithms and their implementation details. In the following examples only edges of the roadmap will be displayed for clearer visualization.

Part A givess important elements regarding implementation. Part B shows the usefulness of our interactive planner with an illustrating example. Last, in part C, we test both our interactive and contact planner in a cluttered environment.

A. Implementation details

The interactive device is a 6D mouse from Immersion, model 3DConnexion. All experiments are performed with Hpp [START_REF] Lamiraux | Hpp: a new software framework for manipulation planning[END_REF] framework developed primarily by the Gepetto team LAAS-CNRS, the collision detection library is Fcl [START_REF] Pan | Fcl: A general purpose library for collision and proximity queries[END_REF], the geometric models are all described using URDF (Unified Robot Description Format) and the 6D mouse driver is our own. Our computer has an Intel R Xeon R CPU E3-1240 v3 @ 3.40GHz processor with 16 GB RAM and runs under Ubuntu 14.04.

A particular attention was given to separate work on two different threads. The goal is to let the standard motion planning process alone on its thread and therefore on its processor. All treatments regarding the operator are treated separately on a different thread. As no parallelization of motion planning is implemented we can easily compare our solution with a standard, single processor motion planning implementation.

Treatments regarding the operator are done in the operator thread. They are: moving the object, reading the interactive device data and integrating positions. The same goes for cycling through obstacles to find the nearest one to the object. Again, computing R the rotation matrix and δ the object to contact vector is done on the operator thread. Visualization of the scene is a separate process.

The overhead slowing the planner thread is during contact mode because each new configuration is rotated by R and translated by δ. This means that for every contact configuration the computational overhead is one 3x3 matrix multiplication with a vector and three additions as well as changing the value of q current and some test instructions. This example shows the behavior of algorithm 1. A maze has to be crossed by a non convex 3D object that is small compared to the dimensions of the walls, see figure 4. No samples can be shot beyond the walls height to forbid shortcuts.

B. Maze Example : interactive algorithm

In figure 5 a standalone RRTconnect solves the problem in 3 minutes with 3690 nodes and 7378 edges with α = 0.5. Figure 6 shows the result of the same problem solved with the help of a user which has much better results, solving the problem in one minute with 1453 nodes and 2904 edges. This section presents a cluttered environment that is hard to solve using simple RRT method. We will show that our interactive planner outperforms it radically. Using our contact method (algorithm 3), we are able to improve the efficiency planning processes. We then discuss the influence of authority sharing.

1) Environment: In this experiment, the object is a nonconvex L-shape. The environment figure 7 consists of two blue planes forming a cluttered space as the object can rotate only in a few directions. Two red planes form an even more cluttered space where the object can freely rotate only around one axis. Small rotations around other axis, though, are still possible before getting in collision. The distance between the two first walls is 1.2 meter while the distance between the two next walls is 0.75 meter. The length of the object is 1.6 meter, its height 0.8 meter and its width 0.4 meter. This means that the object can pass through the narrow passage with only small variations around roll and pitch axis.

The goal configuration is at a corner of the red area behind an oblique bar therefore the object will have to slide in order to reach the goal. The second experiment figure 11 is held with the help of an experienced user 6D mouse with our interactive algorithm 1. Cooperation factor α is set to 0.5. This experiments lasts for 3 minutes with a roadmap holding 3424 nodes and 6846 edges. As expected, the help of an operator radically changed the speed of the process. Rapidly, when samples lay in an interesting space, random samples also tend to be generated in this space, we can see that the amount of nodes sampled is very small in comparison to the RRT method.

3) Contact tests: The performance of our contact algorithm 2 is tested with a series of experiments by changing the value of α. Whenever the operator approaches the object to an obstacle, samples are generated along a tangent plane to it. The tree grows fast on surfaces. To get inside the red area near the goal configuration, the object should slide along one plane but this requires freezing some degrees of freedom. While this can be a challenge for a random shooter, our in-contact shooter solves the problem much quicker when we want to stay in contact with the obstacle.

D. Results

The following table presents the results of experiments in the cluttered environment. RRT standalone planner is clearly much slower than any other solution. Comparing interactive mode without contact (algorithm 1) to interactive and contact sampling (algorithm 2), with the same value of α (=0.5), the time and number of nodes decreases significantly.

It is necessary to analyze the contact algorithm according to alpha parameter. With a control sharing factor α getting smaller, the algorithm keeps growing in performance until a minimal point is reached with α = 0.08. This means that 92% of the time is given to the operator. The fact is that this time is not completely given to the operator because when the user move the objet close to contact, the contact mode (Contact Sampling) automatically expands nodes on the surface. We have three operating modes:

• one mode by user when objet is far from obstacle,

• one by algorithm to explore region randomly,

• one by user to guide exploration of contact region The parameter α must be very small because otherwise too much nodes and edges are added by the computer in uninteresting space. Values of α smaller than 0.08 loose the benefit from random sampling and the obtained results get less competitive. Either way, our in contact algorithm is always much faster, requiring much less nodes and edges than the interactive planner without any contact sampling. V. CONCLUSION Our interactive contact algorithm make a step forward in assembly path planning. It is a twofold contribution that helps solving cluttered situations where objects need to slide on each other by keeping contact. Some cluttered environments or insertion cases could benefit from this novel algorithm. We have shown the influence of authority sharing on the results of path planning.

The main drawback of our method is that contact sampling cannot follow multiple contact but stays only on one plane at a time. So far we imposed the contact sampling orientation to be chosen by the user but another strategy could be implemented for different test cases.

Future work would be to implement an algorithm capable of following iteratively many different planes and enabling

Fig. 1 :

 1 Fig. 1: Moving object and roadmap visualization

else 9 :

 9 ContactSampling(P o , P n , N, q device )

Fig. 4 :

 4 Fig. 4: Maze Object.

Fig. 5 :

 5 Fig. 5: RRT-connect Fig. 6: Interactive

Fig. 7 :Fig. 8 :

 78 Fig. 7: Cluttered Space

2 )Fig. 12 : 8 Fig. 13 : 2 Fig. 14 :

 212813214 Fig. 12: Contact α = 0.8

  Figures 12,[START_REF] Flavigné | Interactive motion planning for assembly tasks[END_REF] and 14 show three results with different values of α.

TABLE I :

 I Cluttered environment results

change of orientation. We would also like to integrate the user in a Virtual Reality platform with a haptic arm to get force feedback to simplify the work of an operator in complex 3D environments.