David St-Onge

• P. Eng., MPM PhD
• Professor (Associate) at École de Technologie Supérieure

Introduction The deployment of mobile robots on construction sites has gained increasing attention from both academic research and industry due to labor shortages and the demand for more efficient project management. However, integrating robotic systems into dynamic and hazardous construction environments remains challenging. Key obstacles include...

Mobile robotic systems are increasingly used in various work environments to support productivity. However, deploying robots in workplaces crowded by human workers and interacting with them results in safety challenges and concerns, namely robot-worker collisions and worker distractions in hazardous environments. Moreover, the literature on risk as...

The construction industry has long explored robotics and computer vision, yet their deployment on construction sites remains very limited. These technologies have the potential to revolutionize traditional workflows by enhancing accuracy, efficiency, and safety in construction management. Ground robots equipped with advanced vision systems could au...

In industrial environments, predicting human actions is essential for ensuring safe and effective collaboration between humans and robots. This paper introduces a perception framework that enables mobile robots to understand and share information about human actions in a decentralized way. The framework first allows each robot to build a spatial gr...

In industrial environments, predicting human actions is essential for ensuring safe and effective collaboration between humans and robots. This paper introduces a perception framework that enables mobile robots to understand and share information about human actions in a decentralized way. The framework first allows each robot to build a spatial gr...

This research addresses the challenges of defining and tuning a flight controller for uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), mainly, a lighter-than-air vehicle, like a blimp; a task often fraught with complexity for UAV designers. These challenges typically involve several iterations in both simulation and real-world settings that require the identificat...

The manufacturing sector was recently affected by workforce shortages, a problem that automation and robotics can heavily minimize. Simultaneously, reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising solution where robots can learn through interaction with the environment. In this work, we leveraged a simplistic robotic system to work with RL with "real...

Airships, best recognized for their unique quality of payload/energy ratio, present a fascinating challenge for the field of engineering. Their construction and operation require a delicate balance of materials and rules, making them a compelling object of study. They embody a distinct intersection of physics, design, and innovation, offering a wid...

The demand for cognitive load assessment with low-cost easy-to-use equipment is increasing, with applications ranging from safety-critical industries to entertainment. Though pupillometry is an attractive solution for cognitive load estimation in such applications, its sensitivity to light makes it less robust under varying lighting conditions. Mul...

Robotics can help address the growing worker shortage challenge of the manufacturing industry. As such, machine tending is a task collaborative robots can tackle that can also highly boost productivity. Nevertheless, existing robotics systems deployed in that sector rely on a fixed single-arm setup, whereas mobile robots can provide more flexibilit...

The uncrewed aerial systems industry is rapidly expanding due to advancements in smaller electronics, smarter sensors, advanced flight controllers, and embedded perception modules leveraging artificial intelligence. These technological progress have opened new indoor applications for UAS, including warehouse inventory management, security inspectio...

Remote sensing of spectral reflectance is a crucial parameter in precision agriculture. In particular, the visual color produced from reflected light can be used to determine plant health (VIS-IR) or attract pollinators (Near-UV). However, the UV spectral reflectance studies largely focus on non-crop plants, even though they provide essential infor...

Remote sensing of spectral reflectance is a crucial parameter in precision agriculture. In particular, the visual color produced from reflected light can be used to determine plant health (VIS-IR) or attract pollinators (Near-UV). However, the UV spectral reflectance studies largely focus on non-crop plants, even though they provide essential infor...

Many people are fascinated by biological swarms, but understanding the behavior and inherent task objectives of a bird flock or ant colony requires training. Whereas several swarm intelligence works focus on mimicking natural swarm behaviors, we argue that this may not be the most intuitive approach to facilitate communication with the operators. I...

Construction progress tracking and monitoring is a complex process, crucial for the smooth execution of projects and delivery of a high-quality product to the client. However, these tasks remain primarily manual, time-consuming and error prone, and can lead to cost and time overruns. The objective of the present research is to develop a system base...

Additive manufacturing and its growth in advanced industrial fields are changing many process paradigms for the development of highly customizable components. It condenses the traditional approaches to produce assemblies that are more and more integrated at different levels: functionality (strength, lightness), productivity (flexibility, customizat...

Precision agriculture aims to use technological tools for the agro-food sector to increase productivity, cut labor costs, and reduce the use of resources. This work takes inspiration from bees vision to design a remote sensing system tailored to incorporate UV-reflectance into a flower detector. We demonstrate how this approach can provide feature-...

The objective at the end of this chapter is to be able to:

The deployment of robotic systems always brings several challenges. Among them, safety is of uttermost importance, as these robots share their environment with humans at a certain degree. In this chapter, you will get an overlook of some standards relevant to robotic systems, pertaining mostly to their scope and the organizations issuing them. Thes...

The amount of knowledge needed to deploy a robotic system can sometimes feel overwhelming. However, many individual problems were solved already, including software ecosystems to simulate and then deploy our robots seamlessly. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open-source solution addressing this critical sharing need for robotic sensing, cont...

This chapter brings a set of assessments to cover several topics relevant to both mobile robots and manipulator robots with a single integrated robotic platform. Several engineering courses are available with hands-on laboratory on industrial manipulators and custom-made mobile robot prototypes. What we found was lacking is teaching material levera...

The objective at the end of this chapter is to be able to:

This chapter is an extensive overview of the history of automata and robotics from the Hellenistic period, which saw the birth of science and technology, and during which lived the founders of modern engineering, to today. Contemporary robotics is actually a very young field. It was preceded by a 2000-years period in which highly sophisticated auto...

Several industrial pick-and-place applications, such as collaborative assembly lines, rely on visual tracking of the parts. Recurrent occlusions are caused by the manipulator motion decrease line productivity and can provoke failures. This work provides a complete solution for maintaining the occlusion-free line of sight between a variable-pose cam...

Spherical rolling robots (SRR) have been a promising avenue for the exploration of unstructured environments with variable topologies. The advantages include the ability to move fast, robustness to collision, and a lower number of actuators. However, to finally be used in real missions and applications, they need to have a high maneuverability and...

Advancements in robotics have traditionally been considered the domain of engineering and computer science. However, cross-disciplinary collaborations between the arts and engineering can help drive technical solutions in robotics and fuel innovation in contemporary art (Goldberg, 2001; Herath and Kroos, 2016a; Herath and Kroos, 2016b; Stelarc, 201...

The exploration of new lands has always been a source ofmotivation for mankind. Despite the common idea that ourplanet is fully known, a huge number of inaccessible placesstill remains unvisited today, especially below the surface.Recent advances in robotics allow some of these locationsto be explored by unmanned vehicles. This paper presentsthe de...

Redundancy and parallelism make decentralized multi-robot systems appealing solutions for the exploration of extreme environments. However, effective cooperation can require team-wide connectivity and a carefully designed communication. Several recently proposed decentralized connectivity maintenance approaches exploit elegant algebraic results dra...

Modeling with multimodal data in the wild poses similar challenges in human-computer and human-robot interaction (HCI, HRI). This workshop series thus blends HCI and HRI to jointly address a broad range of current topics in multimodal modeling aimed at designing intelligent systems in the wild. From addressing data scarcity in multimodal user state...

The exploration of new lands has always been a source of motivation for mankind. Despite the common idea that our planet is fully known, a huge number of inaccessible places still remains unvisited today, especially below the surface. Recent advances in robotics allow some of these locations to be explored by unmanned vehicles. This paper presents...

As the use of autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) for automated data collection from construction projects increases, construction stakeholders have become aware of a problem with inter-disciplinary semantic data sharing and exchanges between construction and robotic. Cross-domain data translation requires detailed specifications especially w...

Several deployment locations of mobile robotic systems are human made (i.e. urban firefighter, building inspection, property security) and the manager may have access to domain-specific knowledge about the place, which can provide semantic contextual information allowing better reasoning and decision making. In this paper we propose a system that a...

With the growth in automated data collection of construction projects, the need for semantic navigation of mobile robots is increasing. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure to leverage building-related information for smarter, safer and more precise robot navigation during construction phase. Our use of Building Information Models (BIM) in r...

With growth in the use of autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) for automated data collection from construction projects, the problem of inter-disciplinary semantic data sharing and exchanges between construction and robotic domains has attracted construction stakeholders' attention. Cross-domain data translation requires detailed specifications...

Many applications related to the Internet-of-Things, such as tracking people or objects, robotics, and monitoring require localization of large networks of devices in dynamic, GPS-denied environments. Ultra-WideBand (UWB) technology is a common choice because of its precise ranging capability. However, allowing access and effective use of the share...

A polynomial solution to the inverse kinematic problem of the Kinova Gen3 Lite robot is proposed in this paper. This serial robot is based on a 6R kinematic chain and is not wrist-partitioned. We first start from the forward kinematics equation providing the position and orientation of the end-effector, finally, the univariate polynomial equation i...

The coordination of robot swarms -- large decentralized teams of robots— generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments where robot motion, unstructured environments, limited computational resources, low bandwidth, and robot failures add t...

Many applications benefit from the use of multiple robots, but their scalability and applicability are fundamentally limited when relying on a central control station. Getting beyond the centralized approach can increase the complexity of the embedded software, the sensitivity to the network topology, and render the deployment on physical devices t...

Interconnected devices and mobile multi-robot systems are increasingly present in many real-life scenarios. To be effective, these systems need to collect large amounts of data from their environment, and often these data need to be aggregated, shared, and distributed. Many multi-robot systems are designed to share state information and commands, b...

When faced with the need of implementing a decentralized behavior for a group of collaborating robots, strategies inspired from swarm intelligence often avoid considering the human operator, granting the swarm with full autonomy. However, field missions require at least to share the output of the swarm to the operator. Unfortunately, little is know...

The control of multiple robots in the context of tele-exploration tasks is often attentionally taxing, resulting in a loss of situational awareness for operators. Unmanned aerial vehicle swarms require significantly more multitasking than controlling a plane, thus making it necessary to devise intuitive feedback sources and control methods for thes...

Since the beginning of space exploration, Mars and the moon have been examined via orbiters, landers, and rovers. More than 40 missions have targeted Mars, and over 100 have been sent to the moon. Space agencies continue to focus on developing novel strategies and technologies for probing celestial bodies. Multirobot systems are particularly promis...

The coordination of robot swarms-large decentralized teams of robots-generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments. Unstructured environments, limited computational resources, low bandwidth, and robot failures all contribute to the comple...

The coordination of robot swarms - large decentralized teams of robots - generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments. Unstructured environments, limited computational resources, low bandwidth, and robot failures all contribute to the co...

Redundancy and parallelism make decentralized multi-robot systems appealing solutions for the exploration of extreme environments. However, effective cooperation often requires team-wide connectivity and a carefully designed communication strategy. Several recently proposed decentralized connectivity maintenance approaches exploit elegant algebraic...

Reports on the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2019) that was held in Montreal, Canada, focusing on the importance of artistic contributions to the field of robotics research and to its social and cultural impacts.

We address the problem of progressively deploying a set of robots to a formation defined as a point cloud, in a decentralized manner. To achieve this, we present an algorithm that transforms a given point cloud into an acyclic directed graph. This graph is used by the control law to allow a swarm of robots to progressively form the target shape bas...

In recent years, researchers have explored human body posture and motion to control robots in more natural ways. These interfaces require the ability to track the body movements of the user in three dimensions. Deploying motion capture systems for tracking tends to be costly and intrusive and requires a clear line of sight, making them ill adapted...

Localization and tracking are two very active areas of research for robotics, automation, and the Internet-of-Things. Accurate tracking for a large number of devices usually requires deployment of substantial infrastructure (infrared tracking systems, cameras, wireless antennas, etc.), which is not ideal for inaccessible or protected environments....

The stable and repeatable grasping of objects lying on a flat hard surface is addressed in this paper. A physical model of an object lying on a flat surface and its interaction with the environment and with a gripper is proposed. The important parameters governing the interaction are obtained. From this model, a grasping procedure is established an...

Interconnected devices and mobile multi-robot systems are increasingly present in many real-life scenarios. To be effective, these systems need to collect large amounts of data from their environment, and often these data need to be aggregated, shared, and distributed. Many multi-robot systems are designed to share state information and commands, b...

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have generally little capacity to carry payloads. Through collaboration, the UAVs can increase their joint payload capacity and carry more significant loads. For maximum flexibility to dynamic and unstructured environments and task demands, we propose a fully decentralized control infrastructure based on a swar...

In this paper, we demonstrate how behavioural structure, such as a finite state machine, can emerge in minimal robots without computation nor memory capabilities. As a case study we observe the ability of a group of non-holonomic robots to form robust, self-healing circle formations in a decentralized manner using only a limited frontal binary sens...

One of the safest and most reliable strategies for vehicle's collision avoidance is embedded control at low level to guarantee safe motion in all situations using on-board sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight collision avoidance strategy that can be implemented as a low level motion control to achieve safe motion while simultaneou...

The robotics community is considering the use of large groups of robots, also known as artificial swarms for applications in unknown and dynamic environments. In this context, swarms of robot will need to interact with users to accomplish their mission. Unfortunately, little is known about the users' perception of group behavior and dynamics, as we...

This demonstration will present a software concept and architecture for the control robot swarms for user studies. Exploring user perception of a swarm»s motion and the dynamics of its members is a topic of growing interest. However, at the time of writing, no structured methodology that ensures repeatable and scalable studies is available. We post...

With the growing number of robotic devices introduced by automation and the Internet-of-Things, comes also a growth in the interest for methods and tools to deploy new code updates to active sensor arrays and to swarms of robots. This paper presents a toolset that can perform an over-the-air code update of the robots in a swarm while the swarm is a...

Current efforts in active debris removal strategies and mission planning focus on removing the largest, most massive debris. It can be argued, however, that small untrackable debris, specifically those smaller than 5 cm in size, also pose a serious threat. In this work, we propose and analyze a mission to sweep the most crowded Low Earth Orbit with...

This paper address the challenges encountered by developers when deploying a distributed decision-making behavior on heterogeneous robotic systems. Many applications benefit from the use of multiple robots, but their scalability and applicability are fundamentally limited if relying on a central control station. Getting beyond the centralized appro...

Creating an infrastructure flexible enough for all researchers to feel unconstrained while accelerating their work with an optimized and specialized software solution is a tedious task. One that ROS has overcome for many roboticists. Specific to swarm deployment, the MIST laboratory released in 2016 a programming language for swarms: Buzz. Its purp...

Despite previous successes and growing research interest in swarm robotics there are still many challenges to be addressed. We focus on compatibility, code portability and programability of swarms. Most research teams customize existing hardware platforms and develop very specific software platforms with little to no regard to previously mentioned...

This paper presents a novel reflection on interaction devices between human and robots. Robots are most currently seen as tools, extensions of the human body designed and meant to serve its needs. The development of artificial intelligence forces us to reconsider that paradigm, and to ask ourselves the question of who, during the human-machine dial...

Emergency response require extensive knowledge of the crisis area and up-to-date information on structures, road access, victims location and new threats. Collecting and sharing this information is challenging, especially in a hostile environment where there is often no reliable network infrastructure. We are developing a software infrastructure to...

Due to the recent technological progress, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has become a major field of research in both engineering and artistic realms, particularly so in the last decade. The mainstream interests are, however, extremely diverse: challenges are continuously shifting, the evolution of robot’ skills, as well as the advances in methods f...

Robots descend from the long genealogy of automata, machines with no practical purposes essentially meant to simulate objects embedded with an anima. Our hypothesis is that the thrust for the creation of every robot is rooted in the primordial myth of infusing inanimate matter with the breath of life: the aim of any automaton is to become a living...

This paper presents a new design of a deployable one degree-of-freedom (DOF) mechanism. Polygonal rigid-link designs are first investigated. Then, belt-driven links are considered in order to maximize the expansion ratio while avoiding flattened ill-conditioned parallelogram configurations. The planar basic shape of the proposed design is a triangl...

Proposition de système d’exploration minière par l’utilisation de dirigeables. Comparaison avec la technologie des quadrocoptères et présentation d’une exploration dans la caverne La Verna des Pyrénnées.

This article presents results on the dynamic modelling of a cubic flying robot referred to as the Tryphon. Four identical prototypes of the Tryphon are currently available, in addition to numerous earlier prototypes. They are used for artistic performances in museums, art galleries or theatres. Unique in the airship realm, the Tryphons are difficul...

Initiated as a research-creation project by professor and artist Nicolas Reeves, the Aerostabile project quickly expanded to include researchers and artists from a wide range of disciplines. Its current phase brings together four robotic and research-creation labs with various expertises in unstable and dynamic environments. The first group, under...

This research aims to propose a new paradigm in orbital debris removal systems. While most groups addressing this issue focus on the high priority of removing the largest debris, we consider the threat posed by those smaller than 10cm as serious. A 2cm paint chip is known to be able to render useless most spacecraft as well as being way more diffic...

In this paper, we present two unique aerobots: the spherical blimp used for satellite emulation and the cubic blimp developed for use in floating architecture and visual art. The blimp designs bear a number of similarities, in particular, their construction with an exoskeleton, full actuation to enable six-dof motion and requirement for autonomous...

The Tryphons and their predecessors from the [ VOILES | SAILS ] project are large cubic indoor blimps used autonomously or in remote control mode. Each of these aerobot is equipped with a main micro-computer on-board, a variety of sensors and a wireless communication interface. From a mechanical engineering point of view, the unique shape of these...

This paper presents preliminary results on the dynamic mod-elling of a cubic flying robot referred to as the Tryphon. Several Tryphons and other similar cubic flying robots have been built in the course of this project. They are used for artistic performances in museums, art galleries or theatres. Although the Tryphons are functional, they are diff...

Over the past two decades, an increasing number of artists have been collaborating with engineers and scientists to complete their artwork. Such a teamwork is not trivial to manage, partly due to the differences between art and science cultures. This paper will present three models of collaborations through three examples from robotic arts in Quebe...

The [VOILES | SAILS] project was born from architect and artist Nicolas Reeves' will to evoke the age-old myth of an architecture freed from the law of gravity. Many challenges had to be solved in order to achieve this result, and many skills and expertises were required to implement the different modules of the project, from mechatronics to high-l...

On October 26th 2010, a unique HRI-artistic public experiment took place at the UsineC theater, in Montreal. It was the result of a many-months collaboration between the Montreal based lab hosting the [ VOILES | SAILS ] research-creation platform (Self-Assembling Intelligent Ligther-thanair Structures) and the well-known Australian artist Stelarc a...