Louis Petit is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke since 2025. He is a member of the Createk and IntRoLab research groups at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Technological Innovation (3IT). He was a Postdoctoral Researcher (2024) in Computer Science at the Mobile Robotics Lab at McGill University, working with David Meger and Gregory Dudek. Prior to McGill, he completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke (2023), where he worked with Alexis Lussier Desbiens. He holds a BSc and a MSc in Mechatronics Engineering from UCLouvain (2019). His current research focuses on developing efficient behaviors and strategies to endow autonomous mobile robots with intelligence and environmental awareness for safety, maintenance, and conservation. Applications include exploring unknown environments for search and rescue, advanced driver assistance systems, infrastructure inspection, and spatio-temporal mapping of ecosystems to monitor endangered or invasive flora and fauna.

Louis Petit is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke since 2025. He is a member of the Createk and IntRoLab research groups at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Technological Innovation (3IT). He was a Postdoctoral Researcher (2024) in Computer Science at the Mobile Robotics Lab at McGill University, working with David Meger and Gregory Dudek. Prior to McGill, he completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke (2023), where he worked with Alexis Lussier Desbiens. He holds a BSc and a MSc in Mechatronics Engineering from UCLouvain (2019). 

His current research focuses on developing efficient behaviors and strategies to endow autonomous mobile robots with intelligence and environmental awareness for safety, maintenance, and conservation. He aims to contribute to the advancement of the field by designing and optimizing novel algorithms and models that enable robots to perform complex tasks in real-world environments. His research involves a combination of robotics techniques (e.g., path planning, optimization, decision-making, machine learning, computer vision). By addressing challenges related to efficiency, robustness, and safety, he hopes to enable the widespread use of intelligent robots in diverse applications, from aiding society (e.g., search and rescue, infrastructure inspection, advanced driver-assistance systems) to fostering sustainable development (e.g., seabed mapping, endangered plants monitoring). 

His work in robotic navigation has been published in top-tier journals and conferences (RA-L, IROS, ICRA). He has contributed to open-source libraries widely used in the robotics community (OMPL, RTAB-Map). His research on optimal path planning has received the Best Student Paper award and a Best Paper finalist award at SMC 2021. He has received numerous faculty awards at the Université de Sherbrooke for his work in autonomous robotic exploration (best doctoral thesis in the faculty, Leonardo da Vinci medal of merit, excellence scholarship, popularization awards). Dr. Petit also won the title of Belgian robotics vice-champion and Swiss guest champion at Eurobot 2018. He has worked with major industrial partners who now use and deploy his work in the field (e.g. Audi, Parks Canada, BRP, Hydro-Québec).