Louis Petit is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke since 2025. 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 fauna and flora. His research involves a combination of path planning, optimization, decision-making, machine learning, computer vision, and other robotics techniques. 

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). 

Dr. Petit 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. 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).