My name is Andre Phu-Van Nguyen and I’m an M.Sc.A. graduate from Polytechnique Montreal part of the Mobile Robotics and Autonomous Systems Laboratory under professors Jerome Le Ny and David Saussié.

I currently (2020) work at Applanix where I’m part of the Autonomy team primarily on LIDAR based SLAM for various autonomous vehicles.

In the past, I have been a lab instructor for two classes

• INF1500 Logique des systèmes numériques Where I taught students about basic logic circuits, boolean algebra and basic VHDL.
• INF1990 Projet initial en ingénierie informatique et travail en équipe. Where I helped students build a line following robot the the basics of microcontrollers using an atmega32 based board.

My research interests focus on aerial robotics with an emphasis on computer vision and path planning. Since the beginning of my bachelor’s diploma in computer engineering, I have been involved in multiple projects including:

• The 6th iteration of the Esteban Solar Car team where I worked on telemetry systems for remote car monitoring. I was also webmaster and main photographer for a while. In 2012 we participated in the American Solar Challenge raycing across the United-States from Rochester, NY to St. Paul, MN over 8 days. We also participated in the Formula Sun Grand Prix as it is a mandatory event to qualify for the ASC.

• In 2013 I started the Elikos autonomous quadrotor team where I was team director leading us to win 1st place twice at the American Venue of the International Aerial Robotics Competition in the summers of 2014 and 2015. In addition to my responsibilities in terms of team financing and project management, in our first year I worked on getting an optical flow based quadrotor flying using offboard commands (recall that in 2013 px4’s offboard control did not yet exist). In our second year we were able to demonstrate ground robot tracking using blob detection, with a new quadrotor equipped for omnidirectional sensing. For these accomplishments, in 2014 I was given the award of “Directeur de Société Technique de l’année” (best technical club director) by the Association des Étudiants de Polytechnique. All in all, every year I was managing a team of about 20 students and a budget close to $20K.

• In 2016 I was team captain of a group of 4 graduate students participating in the DJI Developper Challenge under the name SaveApril (later renamed MRASL) . We were tasked to fufill a search and rescue mission consisting of taking off of a moving vehicle, searching for AprilTags in a cluttered environment and coming back and landing on a moving vehicle. Out of 130 initial proposals we made it to the last selection rounds out of 10 teams to be invited to Griffis International airport for field trials. Although we did not win, we were still able to publish our moving landing method going at velocity of 50 km/h, the fastest landing of a quadrotor on a moving platform as of yet.

Publications

My involvement in these publications usually revolve around help with the actual implementation of these systems as I am proficient in programming due to my background in computer engineering while still having a good understanding of robotics.

Journal

• M. Srinivasan Ramanagopal, A. Phu-Van Nguyen and J. Le Ny, “A Motion Planning Strategy for the Active Vision-Based Mapping of Ground-Level Structures,” in IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 356-368, Jan. 2018. doi: 10.1109/TASE.2017.2762088
• A. Borowczyk, D.-T. Nguyen, A. Phu-Van Nguyen, D. Q. Nguyen, D. Saussié and J. Le Ny, Autonomous Landing of a Quadcopter on a High-Speed Ground Vehicle. AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics, In Press, 2017.

Conference Proceedings

• A. Borowczyk, D.-T. Nguyen, A. Phu-Van Nguyen, D. Q. Nguyen, D. Saussié and J. Le Ny, Autonomous Landing of a Multirotor Micro Air Vehicle on a High Velocity Ground Vehicle. Proceedings of the IFAC World Congress, Toulouse, France, July 2017.

Awards

• 2015 - Best System Design - International Aerial Robotics Competition - For presenting an autonomous quadrotor vehicle capable of tracking and following ground robots using color blob detection in a GPS denied environment.
• 2015 - Directeur de société technique de l’année - Association des Étudiants de Polytechnique - For starting team Elikos from scratch and representing the school in an international collegiate engineering competition, my efforts were recognized by the school’s student association by naming me director of the year.
• 2014 - Best System Design - International Aerial Robotics Competition - For being the only team capable of optical flow based flight in a GPS denied environment and being the only team capapble of autonomous takeoff. Despite starting our team only 7 months earlier.
• 2011 - Philip and Lily Malouf Prize - Philip and Lily Malouf Foundation - For presenting the best implementation of the first year integrative project in computer and software engineering at Polytechnique Montreal.