François Pomerleau

Dr. François Pomerleau has been a professor at Université Laval since 2017, senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and member of the Order of Engineering of Quebec (OIQ).

He made his debut in research by interacting with the Canadian Space Agency and the European Space Agency during his studies in computer engineering at Université de Sherbrooke. He got his master’s degree from this university in 2009 after a one-year stay as a research engineer at EPFL (Switzerland), where he worked on an early autonomous car prototype. He completed his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) in 2013 during which he participated in several robotic deployments in uncontrolled environments, including work with European fire brigades and in alpine lakes. After technology transfer activities at Alstom Inspection Robotics and a stay at Laval University, he received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to continue his research at the University of Toronto in mobile robotics. His research addresses robotics, more specifically the fields of computer vision, optimization, and 3D geometry.

Major research contributions include highly cited papers on 3D registration and a point-cloud processing library cloned more than 300 times per month. In terms of technological transfers, his research was deployed by multiple organisms around the world such as NASA Ames, ANYbotics AG, General Dynamics, and Defence Research and Development Canada to name a few. He won multiple prices at the international including three best-paper awards and was awarded at the prestigious Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean Challenge.

His long-term goal is to push the boundary of where and when autonomous vehicles will be used effectively and safely.