Jonathan Courbon
Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives, CEA Paris-Saclay - Etablissement de Fontenay-aux-roses, Clermont Université, Institut Pascal, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire d'Informatique et d'Automatique pour les Systèmes, Université Clermont Auvergne
Papers
11
Total Citations
382
H-Index
7
About
Jonathan Courbon is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of computer vision, camera modeling, and autonomous navigation. His research has made significant contributions to how robots — both ground-based and aerial — perceive and navigate their environments using visual information alone. Courbon is perhaps best known for his foundational work on fisheye and omnidirectional camera models for robotic applications. His 2007 paper proposing a generic fisheye camera model has accumulated 111 citations, reflecting its lasting utility as a practical framework for wide-field-of-view imaging systems. This work was complemented by later evaluations of the unified sphere model, helping establish rigorous standards for camera calibration in robotics. A defining thread throughout his career is vision-based navigation using visual memory — a technique where robots learn and replay paths by referencing stored image sequences rather than explicit maps. He applied this paradigm to both non-holonomic wheeled robots and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), with his 2010 aerial navigation paper becoming his most cited work at 123 citations. His quadrotor navigation research demonstrated the viability of onboard, single-camera systems for autonomous flight using natural landmarks — a forward-looking contribution at the time. Across his portfolio, Courbon's work has helped shape modern approaches to practical, vision-only robot autonomy.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Vision-based navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles123 citations · 2010
- 2A generic fisheye camera model for robotic applications111 citations · 2007
- 3Indoor navigation of a non-holonomic mobile robot using a visual memory50 citations · 2008
- 4Visual navigation of a quadrotor Aerial Vehicle36 citations · 2009
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- 10Topological Mapping with Image Sequence Partitioning4 citations · 2012