Portrait of Louis Petit

Louis Petit

Affiliate Member
Assistant Professor, Université de Sherbrooke, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Topics
Autonomous Robotics Navigation
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Multi-Agent Systems
Optimization
Reinforcement Learning
Robotics
Website
Google Scholar
LinkedIn

Publications

Topological mapping for traversability-aware long-range navigation in off-road terrain
Jean-François Tremblay
Julie Alhosh
Louis Petit
Faraz Lotfi
Lara Landauro
David Meger
Autonomous robots navigating in off-road terrain like forests open new opportunities for automation. While off-road navigation has been stud… (see more)ied, existing work often relies on clearly delineated pathways. We present a method allowing for long-range planning, exploration and low-level control in unknown off-trail forest terrain, using vision and GPS only. We represent outdoor terrain with a topological map, which is a set of panoramic snapshots connected with edges containing traversability information. A novel traversability analysis method is demonstrated, predicting the existence of a safe path towards a target in an image. Navigating between nodes is done using goal-conditioned behavior cloning, leveraging the power of a pretrained vision transformer. An exploration planner is presented, efficiently covering an unknown off-road area with unknown traversability using a frontiers-based approach. The approach is successfully deployed to autonomously explore two 400 meters squared forest sites unseen during training, in difficult conditions for navigation.
2025-05-19
2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org