Damien LaRocque

I'm a robotics engineer at Sereact in Stuttgart, Germany, where I work at the intersection of robotics, robot learning, and software engineering. I received my master's degree from Université Laval, where I was supervised by Prof. François Pomerleau and Prof. Philippe Giguère. My research focused on developing terrain awareness using proprioceptive sensor data from rovers driving autonomously in forests and winter conditions. During my studies, I've had the valuable opportunity to intern at the Laboratoire de robotique de l'Université Laval, where I worked with Prof. Clément Gosselin. Before joining Université Laval, I did research assistantships at Université de Moncton under the supervision of Prof. Yassine Bouslimani, where I worked on IoT, Deep Learning, and Computer vision projects. I completed my bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Université de Moncton, NB, Canada.

Email / CV / Scholar / Github / LinkedIn

Research

I'm interested in applications of robot learning and learning-based methods for mobile manipulator navigation and for navigation in harsh terrains.

	Using Citizen Science Data as Pre-Training for Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution UAV Images for Natural Forests Post-Disturbance Assessment Kamyar Nasiri, William Guimont-Martin, Damien LaRocque, Gabriel Jeanson, Hugo Bellemare-Vallières, Vincent Grondin, Philippe Bournival, Julie Lessard, Guillaume Drolet, Jean-Daniel Sylvain, Philippe Giguère Forests, 2025 paper / code / blog post
	Proprioception Is All You Need: Terrain Classification for Boreal Forests Damien LaRocque, William Guimont-Martin, David-Alexandre Duclos, Philippe Giguère, François Pomerleau IROS, 2024 project page / arXiv / video / code / blog post
	Uncertainty Analysis for Accurate Ground Truth Trajectories with Robotic Total Stations Maxime Vaidis, William Dubois, Effie Daum, Damien LaRocque, François Pomerleau IROS, 2023 paper page / arXiv
	Kilometer-Scale Autonomous Navigation in Subarctic Forests: Challenges and Lessons Learned Dominic Baril, Simon-Pierre Deschênes, Olivier Gamache, Maxime Vaidis, Damien LaRocque, Johann Laconte, Vladimír Kubelka, Philippe Giguère, François Pomerleau Field Robotics, 2022 paper page / arXiv / video / code / blog post

Design and source code from Jon Barron's website.