About me

I am Damien LaRocque, and I work as a robotics engineer in Sereact 🇩🇪. During my bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, I was actively involved in a robotics student club, which sparked my interest in the field. I later completed a master's degree in Computer Science at Université Laval, within François Pomerleau's lab, specializing in Field Robotics. My research focused on terrain awareness for mobile robots using proprioceptive sensor data.

My current research interests lie at the intersection of mobile manipulation and end-to-end robot learning policies for mobile robot navigation, with the inherent challenge of deploying models on resource-constrained hardware.

Education

Master degree in Computer Science (2020-2024)

I completed a master degree in Computer Science at the Northern Robotics Laboratory at Université Laval, Quebec City, Canada. My thesis, titled "Terrain Analysis using Data from Proprioceptive Sensors on Mobile Robots," explored the relationship between terrain awareness and proprioceptive sensor data from uncrewed ground vehicles.

Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering (2015-2020)

I earned a bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from Université de Moncton, Moncton, Canada. During my undergraduate studies, I represented Canada in the Eurobot robotics competition as part of the Groupe de Robotique de l'Université de Moncton (GRUM). With GRUM, I developed computer vision and localization algorithms for fully autonomous robots. These robots had to perform agility tasks and compete against teams from around fifteen countries worldwide.

Publications

A complete publications list is available on the website of the Norlab, or on my Google Scholar profile.

🚧 Publications list in construction 🚧

Here are the BibTeX entries for my publications:

@inproceedings{LaRocque2024,
  title     = {{Proprioception Is All You Need: Terrain Classification for Boreal Forests}},
  url       = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IROS58592.2024.10801407},
  doi       = {10.1109/iros58592.2024.10801407},
  booktitle = {2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  author    = {LaRocque,  Damien and Guimont-Martin,  William and Duclos,  David-Alexandre and Giguère,  Philippe and Pomerleau,  Fran\c{c}ois},
  year      = {2024},
  month     = oct,
  pages     = {11686–11693}
}

% Coauthorships
@inproceedings{Vaidis2023,
  title     = {Uncertainty Analysis for Accurate Ground Truth Trajectories with Robotic Total Stations},
  url       = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/iros55552.2023.10341529},
  doi       = {10.1109/iros55552.2023.10341529},
  booktitle = {2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  author    = {Vaidis,  Maxime and Dubois,  William and Daum,  Effie and LaRocque,  Damien and Pomerleau,  Fran\c{c}ois},
  year      = {2023},
  month     = oct
}

@article{Baril2022,
  title     = {Kilometer-scale autonomous navigation in subarctic forests: challenges and lessons learned},
  volume    = {2},
  issn      = {2771-3989},
  url       = {http://dx.doi.org/10.55417/fr.2022050},
  doi       = {10.55417/fr.2022050},
  number    = {1},
  journal   = {Field Robotics},
  publisher = {Field Robotics Publication Society},
  author    = {Baril,  Dominic and Desch\^enes,  Simon-Pierre and Gamache,  Olivier and Vaidis,  Maxime and LaRocque,  Damien and Laconte,  Johann and Kubelka,  Vladimír and Giguère,  Philippe and Pomerleau,  Fran\c{c}ois},
  year      = {2022},
  month     = mar,
  pages     = {1628–1660}
}

@article{Nasiri2025,
  title     = {{Using Citizen Science Data as Pre-Training for Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution UAV Images for Natural Forests Post-Disturbance Assessment}},
  volume    = {16},
  issn      = {1999-4907},
  url       = {http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/f16040616},
  doi       = {10.3390/f16040616},
  number    = {4},
  journal   = {Forests},
  publisher = {MDPI AG},
  author    = {Nasiri,  Kamyar and Guimont-Martin,  William and LaRocque,  Damien and Jeanson,  Gabriel and Bellemare-Vallières,  Hugo and Grondin,  Vincent and Bournival,  Philippe and Lessard,  Julie and Drolet,  Guillaume and Sylvain,  Jean-Daniel and Giguère,  Philippe},
  year      = {2025},
  month     = mar,
  pages     = {616}
}