Sara Fleury

About

Sara Fleury is a prominent robotics researcher whose work has fundamentally shaped the field of autonomous mobile robot systems. Her research spans intelligent robot architectures, multi-robot cooperation, autonomous navigation, and modular software design — areas in which she has made lasting and highly influential contributions. Fleury's most celebrated work, "An Architecture for Autonomy" (1998), has garnered over 519 citations and remains a foundational reference for designing intelligent, robust robotic systems capable of operating in unpredictable environments. Her involvement in the MARTHA project (255 citations) demonstrated the real-world viability of coordinating fleets of autonomous robots in complex logistics settings such as harbors and airports. Her contributions to planetary rover navigation (184 citations) pushed the boundaries of long-range autonomous operation in unstructured terrain, while her development of GenoM (157 citations) provided the robotics community with a practical, widely adopted framework for building distributed robot software architectures. Beyond systems-level contributions, Fleury also advanced trajectory smoothing techniques using clothoid curves (139 citations) and explored human-robot interaction through the interactive guide robot Rackham. With a body of work exceeding 1,500 cumulative citations, she stands as a significant figure in shaping modern autonomous robotics research and practice.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   An Architecture for Autonomy

   519 citations · 1998
2. 2
   Multi-robot cooperation in the MARTHA project

   255 citations · 1998
3. 3
   Autonomous Rover Navigation on Unknown Terrains: Functions and Integration

   184 citations · 2002
4. 4
   G/sup en/oM: a tool for the specification and the implementation of operating modules in a distributed robot architecture

   157 citations · 2002
5. 5
   Primitives for smoothing mobile robot trajectories

   139 citations · 1995
6. 6
   Rackham: An Interactive Robot-Guide

   54 citations · 2006
7. 7
   Design of a modular architecture for autonomous robot

   50 citations · 2002
8. 8
   Autonomous navigation in outdoor environment: adaptive approach and experiment

   44 citations · 2002
9. 9
   Autonomous Rover Navigation on Unknown Terrains Functions and Integration

   40 citations · 2007
10. 10
    Primitives for smoothing mobile robot trajectories

    31 citations · 2002

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links