Who We Are

The Mobile Robotics Lab is part of the Centre for Intelligent Machines at McGill University, and is led by Professors Gregory Dudek and David Meger. The key theme of our lab's research is sensor-based robotics, namely the use and understanding of sensor data through computer vision and machine learning, as well as decision-making under uncertainty. We have mobile robots that operate underwater, in the air, on the ground, on the sea, as well as robot arms on mobile bases. Our students have access to modern GPU workstations and GPU clusters. Our lab has been heavily involved in multiple aspects of modern robotics research, but our current areas of interest are:

• perception, object recognition, and visual prediction for autonomous navigation both in outdoor and in indoor environments
• model-based, sample-efficient, and risk-aware deep reinforcement learning
• efficient transfer learning of control policies from simulation to real systems
• vision-based imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning, and preference elicitation
• multi-robot coordination and active sampling for better environmental monitoring
• robust vision- and range-based localization
• planning and control under uncertainty
• vision-aided grasping and manipulation
• gait switching and control for amphibious legged robots

Key technical foci are the development of probabilistic models, useful representations for decision making and perception, as well as optimization, learning, and inference. Projects which we have worked on in the past include: place recognition, sketch elaboration and sketch-based image search, extrapolation of image and range data, efficient exploration strategies, robot rendezvous, recommendation systems, map representation, map merging and navigation.

Our lab frequently conducts experiments and robot field trials both indoors and outdoors in challenging environments, such as forests, deserts, mountains, underwater, and air. We even deployed our robots in the Arctic. We are proud members of the NSERC Canadian Field Robotics Network, and in general of Canada's strong robotics community.

Where we are