Portrait de Giovanni Beltrame

Giovanni Beltrame

Membre affilié
Professeur titulaire, Polytechnique Montréal, Département de génie informatique et génie logiciel
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage en ligne
Apprentissage par renforcement
Intelligence en essaim
Interaction humain-robot
Navigation robotique autonome
Robotique
Systèmes distribués
Vision par ordinateur

Biographie

Giovanni Beltrame a obtenu un doctorat en génie informatique du Politecnico di Milano en 2006, après quoi il a travaillé comme ingénieur en microélectronique à l'Agence spatiale européenne (ESA) sur un certain nombre de projets, allant des systèmes tolérants aux radiations à la conception assistée par ordinateur. En 2010, il s'est installé à Montréal. Il est actuellement professeur au Département de génie informatique et logiciel de Polytechnique Montréal. Il dirige notamment le laboratoire MIST, qui se consacre aux technologies spatiales, où plus de 25 étudiant·e·s et postdoctorant·e·s sont sous sa supervision. Il a réalisé plusieurs projets en collaboration avec l'industrie et les agences gouvernementales dans les domaines de la robotique, de l'intervention en cas de catastrophe et de l'exploration spatiale. Avec son équipe, il a participé à plusieurs missions sur le terrain avec l'ESA, l'Agence spatiale canadienne (ASC) et la NASA (BRAILLE, PANAGAEA-X et IGLUNA, entre autres). Ses recherches portent sur la modélisation et la conception de systèmes embarqués, l'intelligence artificielle et la robotique, sujets sur lesquels il a publié plusieurs articles dans des revues et des conférences de premier plan.

Étudiants actuels

Doctorat - Polytechnique
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Collaborateur·rice de recherche - Polytechnique Montreal
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - Polytechnique
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Maîtrise recherche - UdeM
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - Polytechnique
Co-superviseur⋅e :

Publications

Feasibility of cognitive neuroscience data collection during a speleological expedition
Anita Paas
Hugo R. Jourde
Arnaud Brignol
Marie-Anick Savard
Zseyvfin Eyqvelle
Samuel Bassetto
Emily B.J. Coffey
In human cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology studies, laboratory-based research tasks have been important to establish principles of … (voir plus)brain function and its relationship to behaviour; however, they differ greatly from real-life experiences. Several elements of real-life situations that impact human performance, such as stressors, are difficult or impossible to replicate in the laboratory. Expeditions offer unique possibilities for studying human cognition in complex environments that can transfer to other situations with similar features. For example, as caves share several of the physical and psychological challenges of safety-critical environments such as spaceflight, underground expeditions have been developed as an analogue for astronaut training purposes, suggesting that they might also be suitable for studying aspects of behaviour and cognition that cannot be fully examined under laboratory conditions. While a large range of topics and tools have been proposed for use in such environments, few have been evaluated in the field. We tested the feasibility of collecting human physiological, cognitive, and subjective experience data concerning brain state, sleep, cognitive workload, and fatigue, during a speleological expedition in a remote region. We document our approaches and challenges experienced, and provide recommendations and suggestions to aid future work. The data support the idea that cave expeditions are relevant naturalistic paradigms that offer unique possibilities for cognitive neuroscience to complement laboratory work and help improve human performance and safety in operational environments.
PEACE: Prompt Engineering Automation for CLIPSeg Enhancement in Aerial Robotics
Rongge Zhang
Ricardo de Azambuja
From industrial to space robotics, safe landing is an essential component for flight operations. With the growing interest in artificial int… (voir plus)elligence, we direct our attention to learning based safe landing approaches. This paper extends our previous work, DOVESEI, which focused on a reactive UAV system by harnessing the capabilities of open vocabulary image segmentation. Prompt-based safe landing zone segmentation using an open vocabulary based model is no more just an idea, but proven to be feasible by the work of DOVESEI. However, a heuristic selection of words for prompt is not a reliable solution since it cannot take the changing environment into consideration and detrimental consequences can occur if the observed environment is not well represented by the given prompt. Therefore, we introduce PEACE (Prompt Engineering Automation for CLIPSeg Enhancement), powering DOVESEI to automate the prompt generation and engineering to adapt to data distribution shifts. Our system is capable of performing safe landing operations with collision avoidance at altitudes as low as 20 meters using only monocular cameras and image segmentation. We take advantage of DOVESEI's dynamic focus to circumvent abrupt fluctuations in the terrain segmentation between frames in a video stream. PEACE shows promising improvements in prompt generation and engineering for aerial images compared to the standard prompt used for CLIP and CLIPSeg. Combining DOVESEI and PEACE, our system was able improve successful safe landing zone selections by 58.62% compared to using only DOVESEI. All the source code is open source and available online.
From Assistive Devices to Manufacturing Cobot Swarms
Monica Li
Bruno Belzile
Ali Imran
Lionel Birglen
David St-Onge
This paper provides an overview of the latest trends in robotics research and development, with a particular focus on applications in manufa… (voir plus)cturing and industrial settings. We highlight recent advances in robot design, including cutting-edge collaborative robot mechanics and advanced safety features, as well as exciting developments in perception and human-swarm interaction. By examining recent contributions from Kinova, a leading robotics company, we illustrate the differences between industry and academia in their approaches to developing innovative robotic systems and technologies that enhance productivity and safety in the workplace. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates the tremendous potential of robotics to revolutionize manufacturing and industrial operations, and underscores the crucial role of companies like Kinova in driving this transformation forward.
Electromagnetic interference shielding in lightweight carbon xerogels
Biporjoy Sarkar
Floriane Miquet-Westphal
Sanyasi Bobbara
Ben George
David Dousset
Ke Wu
Fabio Cicoira
With the increasing use of high-frequency electronic and wireless devices, electromagnetic interference (EMI) has become a growing concern d… (voir plus)ue to its potential impact on both electronic devices and human health. In this study, we demonstrated the performance of lightweight, electrically conducting 3D resorcinol-formaldehyde carbon xerogels, of 2.4 mm thickness, as an EMI shieldin the frequency range of 10–15 GHz (X-Ku band). The brittle carbon xerogels revealed complex porous structures with irregularly shaped pores that were randomly distributed. Electrochemical characterization revealed that the material behaved as an electrical double-layer capacitor. The carbon xerogels displayed reflection-dominated (∼ 84%) shielding behavior, with a total EMI shielding effectiveness (SE) value of ∼ 61 dB. The absorption process also contributed (∼ 16%) to the total SE. This behavior is attributed to the carbon xerogels' complex porous network, which effectively suppresses EM waves.
Reinforcement Learning with Random Delays
Action and observation delays commonly occur in many Reinforcement Learning applications, such as remote control scenarios. We study the ana… (voir plus)tomy of randomly delayed environments, and show that partially resampling trajectory fragments in hindsight allows for off-policy multi-step value estimation. We apply this principle to derive Delay-Correcting Actor-Critic (DCAC), an algorithm based on Soft Actor-Critic with significantly better performance in environments with delays. This is shown theoretically and also demonstrated practically on a delay-augmented version of the MuJoCo continuous control benchmark.