Seminar presented by S. Lacroix

Date : 2012/11/16 / Time : 10.30 pm
Location : Amphi Bessel, Centre de Recherches de Royallieu, BP 20529 - 60205 Compiegne Cedex

Simon LACROIX is a Research scientist in mobile robotics . He is a member of Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS, UPR 8001) at the LAAS (Toulouse, France)

Simon Lacroix graduated from Ecole Centrale de Paris in 1990. He then prepared a PhD at LAAS, on autonomous navigation for planetary rovers. After a one-year postDoc in the Center for Intelligent Machines of McGill University, Montreal, he joined LAAS as a permanent research scientist in 1996. He currently animates the field robotics activities of the laboratory, and his research are focused on the deployment of teams of multiple heterogeneous autonomous robots for exploration, surveillance or intervention missions. His main interests are perception and navigation for autonomous aerial and terrestrial robots (environment perception and modeling, localization, perception control and autonomous navigation strategies), and decisional processes for autonomous cooperation within multi-robot teams.

Title :

Autonomous systems in cubic kilometers.

Abstract :
The complementarities brought by aerial and terrestrial robots obviously yields operational benefits in many field robotics applications, by extending the scope of functions that can be achieved by the robots. From a robotic standpoint, such systems of systems also allow the development of cooperative schemes and synergies, and raise several research issues on the usual perception and decision functionalities.
The talk will analyse the required functionalities for the deployment of teams of autonomous aerial and terrestrial robots over large scales of space and time, under various conditions. It will focus on the importance of environment representations, which are the main information on which autonomous cooperation schemes can be defined. Even when a priori available, environment models need to be updated and/or refined by the robots : that fact that the perception processes are distributed among heterogeneous robots challenges the sensor fusion schemes developed for single robots, and in particular for localization, which plays a central role in the management of the environment models. The presentation will be illustrated with various