Autonomous all-terrain robots

Tree cover disrupting satellite signals, uncharted or rough terrain… Satellite geolocation systems are highly practical and are widely used, but they are not effective in all situations.

François Pomerleau, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Université Laval, is studying the localization  of autonomous vehicles. Operating in northern or difficult conditions, these mobile robots require precise measurements that go beyond those provided by global navigation satellite systems (GNSS, the best known of which is the United States Global Positioning System or GPS). The researcher and his team have designed an ultra-precise vehicle localization system that measures the vehicle's position and orientation in 3D, while drawing its own map in real time.

This system uses lidar sensors, a technique employing laser beams to estimate distances. To test its performance, the scientists set up their equipment in Université Laval’s Montmorency Forest. By combining three tripods equipped with robotic heads, they were able to track the vehicle in three dimensions, allowing it to adapt to rugged terrain, unlike cars, which travel on flat surfaces. The researchers tested the impact of snow and other environmental changes on their algorithms.

Thanks to the efforts of doctoral student Maxime Vaidis, the team also collected an extensive dataset. They are now working on new ways to use this data and the sensors, which could answer a host of questions in future research, both on the road and in the forest. Indeed, a team involved in space exploration has already expressed interest in this work because, after all, exploring unknown terrain presents the same challenges, whether on Earth or elsewhere.

References

• Vaidis, M., Giguere, P., Pomerleau, F., et Kubelka, V. (2021). Accurate outdoor ground truth based on total stations. 2021 18th Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV), Burnaby, Colombie-Britannique (Canada), p. 1-8. doi: 10.1109/CRV52889.2021.00012
• Vaidis, M., Dubois, W., Guénette, A., Laconte, J., Kubelka, V., et Pomerleau, F. (2023). Extrinsic calibration for highly accurate trajectories reconstruction. 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Londres (Royaume-Uni), p. 4185-4192. doi: 10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.1016050