Welcome to the site of the Northern Robotics Laboratory (norlab) at Laval University. Our research laboratory is specialized in mobile and autonomous systems working in northern or difficult conditions. We aim at investigating new challenges related to navigation algorithms to push the boundary of what is currently possible to achieve with a mobile robot in real-life conditions. The current focus of the laboratory is on localization algorithms designed for laser sensors (lidar) and 3D reconstruction of the environment. We will use this website to showcase our results and to simplify the knowledge transfer with some general tips & tricks.
News
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First appearance of the lab in IEEE Spectrum
Norlab appears in the online version of the magazine IEEE Spectrum with the title DARPA Subterranean Challenge: Meet the First 9 Teams. They confuse our Fren...
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Three articles accepted at ICRA 2019!
We are happy to announce that we have three accepted publications at the 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
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First sensor from RoboSense in Quebec!
The laboratory received recently a RS-LIDAR-16 from RoboSense. This is the first unit delivered in Quebec and we are happy to use it for our project on 3D ma...
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Undergraduate Student Research Awards
Congratulation to Simon-Pierre Deschênes for his Undergraduate Student Research Awards (USRA). We are welcoming this addition to the team during this summer!
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French Version of the Site
We start the deployment of the French version of the website. Don’t hesitate to report any article missing a translation.
Research
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Satellite Visibility Prediction
Abstract To help future mobile agents plan their movement in harsh environments,a predictive model has been designed to determine what areas would be favorab...
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Forest Mapping
Quick facts: 1.4 hectares of forest mapped with a Clearpath Husky and a Velodyne HDL-32E 943 trees were manually segmented in point clouds, and their di...
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Scutigera Project
Exploration of large caves is challenging using traditional mapping tools. There are limited places to install a tripod equipped with a highly accurate lidar...
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Manipulation
Open position for a Ph.D. student!
Publications
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Lidar Measurement Bias Estimation via Return Waveform Modelling in a Context of 3D Mapping
In a context of 3D mapping, it is very important to obtain accurate measurements from sensors. In particular, LIDAR measurements are typically treated as a z...
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Survey on UAV, lidar and underground mapping
This survey presents an overall view of lidar (Light Detection And Ranging) used on UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and their project.
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Learning a Bias Correction for Lidar-only Motion Estimation
This paper presents a novel technique to correct for bias in a classical estimator using a learning approach. We apply a learned bias correction to a lidar-o...