Le titre

Justin Cano

Research in progress...

Short biography

Justin Cano, born in 1994, is currently a research engineer at ONERA, Toulouse, The French Aerospace lab and specialized in tropospheric radio-comunications. He received his Ph.D. with mention, in 2023,  from both Polytechnique Montréal (QC, Canada) and ISAE-Supaéro (Toulouse, France). He was advised by Prof. Jérôme Le Ny, was part of Canadian research groups GERAD (Group for Research in Decision Analysis) and MRASL (Mobile Robotics and Autonomous Systems Laboratory, EE department, Polytechnique). For the French part of his Ph.D, he was co-advised by Drs. Éric Chaumette and Gaël Pagès, was with DEOS (Department of Optronics, Electronics and Signal processing, NAVIR²ES research team) and with doctoral school MITT (Maths, Computer Eng. and Telecommunication of Toulouse) of the Toulouse Federal University.
He completed a Master of Science degree at Polytechnique Montreal, advised by Prof. Le Ny, in 2019 and his dissertation was nominated to the excellence prize at Poly. Between 2014 and 2016 he studied Computer Science and Automation at the Engineering School of Centrale Méditerranée, Marseille, France and received the Master of Engineering in 2019, achieving his double degree.

Research interests

  • Satellite Systems (GEO or LEO);
  • Navigation systems based on radio-frequency (indoors UWB or outdoors GNSS and 4G);
  • Signal Processing;
  • Machine learning;
  • Optimization and control;
  • Multi-agent systems,  sensor networks;

My Ph.D. work was on the automated deployment of robot swarms using Kalman Filters, sensor fusion and distributed architecture. Localization aided by Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology and synchronization issues are also involved in my research. Motion planning is important in swarm deployment due to the dependency between localization accuracy and networks topology. I am also interested in the integration and development of ROS (Robot Operative Systems) code features to localize and schedule motion of robots.
Currently, I work on the propagation aspect in both VHTS (Very High Troughput Satellite) systems and multi-orbital constellations such as IRIS² or OneWeb. In particular, my research focuses on the deployment of Fade Mitigation Techniques, to counteract the effects of tropospheric attenuation that can be of several tens of decibels above 20GHz. An other part of my work is the design of signal processing algorithms to anticipate channel behavior and to identify opportunity signals  for navigation.

Teaching activities

As instructor

  • Satellite communication systems (2025-now) intervention as a keynote speaker for the SISN option (directed by Dr. Muriel Roche) at Centrale Méditerranée, second year of undergrad course.
  • Applied Maths and Control Practices  graduate courses for aerospace engineering master students at ISAE-Supaéro, respectively with the teams of Profs. Judith Vancostenoble and Yves Brière.
  • Signal Processing  Practices and Laboratories (2022-2023) first year undergrad course at ISAE-Supaero, part of the team lead by Profs. Jordi Vila-Valls, François Vincent and Éric Chaumette.
  • Linear control - Automatique : Practical cases/ laboratory instructor (2021-now) a second year course at ISAE-Supaero France, I am with the teaching team of Pr. Caroline Bérard.
  • Active circuits - ELE2611: Corrector and Jury (2017-2021) a second year course for Electrical Engineering undergraduates at Polytechnique Montréal, I am with the teaching team lead by Prof. Jérôme Le Ny.
  • Linear SISO control - ELE3201 : Laboratory instructor and corrector (2017-2021) a third year fundamental course for Electrical Engineering undergraduates at Polytechnique Montréal, I belong to the teaching team lead by Prof. Roland Malhamé. 

As thesis co-director

  • upcoming, 2026: Axel Jacquet, Thesis on channel modeling for Mega-Constellations of Satellite. Co advised with Drs. Laurent Castanet (ONERA/DEMR) and José Radzik (ISAE/DEOS).

As research internship supervisor

  • 2025: Flavio Corti, from  Centrale Méditerranée, co-advised with Hugo Bougoin (ONERA/DEMR), Jonathan Israël (ONERA/DEMR), Gaël Pagès (ISAE/DEOS), first  year of Master.  Topic : localization using opportunistic 4G PRS signals.
  • 2025: Axel Jacquet , from Centrale Méditerranée, in collaboration with Dr. Jean-Pascal Monvoisin, from ONERA/DEMR, final internship for his engineering study. Topic : develop an AI assistant in order to help tropospheric event classification through large time series of time. Development and training of several models with a methodology that have been considered for a publication at the Ka band conference in October 2025.
  • 2024: Alkan Yerebasmaz,  from Université La Sorbone (formerly Université Pierre-et-Marie Curie), Paris, first year of Master. Testing smart gateway diversity policies with our VHTS simulator BiLiDget. Successfully developed testing
  • 2024: Rida Bahraoui, from  Centrale Méditerranée, as advisor with Jonathan Israel, DEMR, ONERA. Interneship leveraging deep learning to perform predictive classification of rain events on synthetic time series of attenuation.

As research internship co-supervisor

  • 2021-22 : Matthieu Borelle, from INP Grenoble, France, co-advised with Jérôme Le Ny, Internship topic : optimal trajectory computation for an UGV through dynamics programming in terms of positioning;
  • 2021 : Malo Ruaudel, undergraduate student from Polytechnique Montréal, Canada, EE department, co-advised with Roland Malhamé, Internship topic : conception of an embedded chess board using dynamic programming and adversarial AI scheme (3rd year EE final project);
  • 2020-21 : Dean Pretorius, from Stellenbosch University, South Africa, co-advised with Jérôme Le Ny, Internship topic : enhance the localization of a ground robot through model predictive control.

Publications

Regular papers

  1. J. Cano, J. Israel, and L. Feral, “AIRIS2: A Smart Gateway Diversity Algorithm for Very High-Throughput Satellite Systems,” IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, vol. 14, no. 7, pp. 2189–2193, Jul. 2025, doi: 10.1109/LWC.2025.3565705.
    Preprint available here
  2. Cano, J., Queyrel, J., Castanet, L., & Bousquet, M. (2025). Improving the Estimation of Attenuation in Q/V Band Systems With a Kalman‐Based Scintillation Filter. International Journal of Satellite Communications and Networking. https://doi.org/10.1002/sat.1565
  3. J. Cano et J. Le Ny, « Ranging-Based Localizability Optimization for Mobile Robotic Networks », IEEE Transactions on Robotics,  2023, doi: 10.1109/TRO.2023.3263772.
     Preprint available here:  http://arxiv.org/abs/2202.00756
  4. J. Cano, G. Pages, E. Chaumette, and J. Le Ny, “Clock and Power-Induced Bias Correction for UWB Time-of-Flight Measurements,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2022, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2022.3143202.
    Preprint available here    . 

Peer reviewed international conference papers 

  1. Cano, J., Castanet, L., Bousquet, M., Riva, C., Schmidt, M., & Martelluci, A. (2024, September). A Bidirectional link Budget Simulator for VHTS System Design Under Fading Constraints. In Ka & broadband communications conference 2024.
    Preprint available here.
  2. Cano, J., Queyrel, J., Castanet, L., & Bousquet, M. (2024, September). Improving the estimation of attenuation in Q/V band systems with a Kalman-Based scintillation filter. In Ka & broadband communications conference 2024.
    Preprint available here.
  3. J. Cano, Y. Ding, G. Pages, E. Chaumette, et J. Le Ny, « A Robust Kalman Filter Based Approach for Indoor Robot Positionning with Multi-Path Contaminated UWB Data », in ICASSP 2023 - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), june 2023 . doi: 10.1109/ICASSP49357.2023.10096761.
    Preprint available here.

  4. J. Cano, C. Chauffaut, G. Pages, E. Chaumette, et J. Le Ny, « Maintaining Robot Localizability With Bayesian Cramér-Rao Lower Bounds », in Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Kyoto, Japan, oct. 2022.
    Preprint available here.

  5. J. Cano, G. Pagès, E. Chaumette, et J. LE NY, « Optimal Localizability Criterion for Positionning with DIstance-Deteriorated Relative Measurements », in Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Kyoto, Japan, oct. 2022.
    Preprint available here.

  6. J. Cano and J. Le Ny, “Improving Ranging-Based Location Estimation with Rigidity-Constrained CRLB-Based Motion Planning,” in 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2021, pp. 5758–5764. doi: 10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9560750.
    Preprint available here.

  7. J. Cano, S. Chidami, and J. L. Ny, “A Kalman Filter-Based Algorithm for Simultaneous Time Synchronization and Localization in UWB Networks,” in 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2019, pp. 1431–1437. doi: 10.1109/ICRA.2019.8794180.
    Preprint available here.

Dissertations

  1. J. Cano, “Localizability optimization for multi robot systems and applications to ultra-wide band positioning,” PhD Thesis, Polytechnique Montréal/ISAE Supaero, Montreal, QC, Canada/Toulouse, OC, France, 2023.
    Available on Theses.fr
  2. J. Cano, « Synchronisation et positionnement simultanés d’un réseau ultra-large bande et applications en robotique mobile », Master’s Thesis, Polytechnique Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada, 2019. Available on Polypublie site.
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