Husky
Rugged ground robot for research
The Clearpath Husky is a veteran platform in the DREAM Lab, with multiple research projects already behind it. Rugged, skid-steered, and built for outdoors, it has been used across a wide range of field experiments over the years.
Hardware maintenance
I started working with the Husky mostly on the support side, keeping it healthy as a research platform. For example, the drivetrain was replaced in early 2026 after years of accumulated field use.
Field test support
A lot of my involvement has been around field tests: helping others prepare experiments, debugging issues during deployments, and processing the recorded data. On the easier days, I sometimes have a chance to fly a drone and capture aerial footage of the experiments.
Sensor integration
Over time, the Husky has evolved with different exteroceptive sensors for better perception. Adding cameras and lidars, designing the necessary mounts, and running extrinsic calibration so the new data lines up with the rest of the stack has been a recurring task.
NINSAR: perception for precision agriculture
The project I am directly involved in is NINSAR (New ItiNerarieS for Agroecology using cooperative Robots), a French national project exploring how fleets of cooperative robots can support agroecological practices. My contribution focuses on the perception side: building a pipeline that lets a ground robot reliably understand the structure of a crop field for precision agriculture tasks.
In the first round of experiments, I evaluated a ZED 2i stereo camera combined with OctoMap for 3D occupancy mapping of the surrounding environment.
The broader goal is to develop a perception pipeline that scales: training on synthetic data generated in photorealistic simulation (Isaac Sim), and then validating it on real field recordings collected with the Husky. This is still an ongoing effort, but the images below show some of the preliminary results.
