Louis Petit is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Université de Sherbrooke, since 2025. His research focuses on intelligent behaviors and decision-making strategies to enhance the autonomy of aerial, ground, and aquatic robots for safety, maintenance, and conservation. He specializes in path planning, optimization, machine learning, and computer vision, with applications in search and rescue, advanced driver assistance systems, infrastructure inspection, and ecosystem monitoring.

He leads the SAFiR Lab, and is a member of Mila. Prior to Sherbrooke, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at McGill University’s Mobile Robotics Lab. He completed his Ph.D. at Université de Sherbrooke in 2023, receiving the Faculty of Engineering’s Best Doctoral Dissertation award, after earning his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from UCLouvain in 2019.

Prof. Petit has contributed to open-source robotics libraries, including OMPL and RTAB-Map. His work on optimal path planning earned the Best Student Paper and Best Paper Finalist awards at SMC 2021, and he serves as Associate Editor for IJRR and ICRA. In 2018, he was the Belgian vice-champion and Swiss guest champion at Eurobot. He collaborates with major industrial and government partners, including Parks Canada, BRP, and Hydro-Québec, who now use his solutions in the field.