Distinguished Professor
Peter Corke

Biography

Peter is a robotics researcher and educator.  He is the distinguished professor of robotic vision at Queensland University of Technology, and was director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision (2014-2020).  His research is concerned with robotic perception using vision and force, dynamics and control, and the application of robots to mining, agriculture and environmental monitoring. He created widely used open-source software for teaching and research, wrote the best selling textbook “Robotics, Vision, and Control”, created several MOOCs and the Robot Academy, and has won national and international recognition for teaching including 2017 Australian University Teacher of the Year.   He is the Chief Scientist of Dorabot (Shenzhen) and on the advisory boards of Emesent and LYRO. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, the Australian Academy of Science; former editor-in-chief of the IEEE Robotics & Automation magazine; founding editor of the Journal of Field Robotics; founding multi-media editor and executive editorial board member of the International Journal of Robotics Research; member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts on Advanced Robotics series; recipient of the Qantas/Rolls-Royce and Australian Engineering Excellence awards; and has held visiting positions at Oxford, University of Illinois, Carnegie-Mellon University and University of Pennsylvania.  Prior to QUT, he founded and led CSIRO's Autonomous Systems Laboratory (2004-2009). He received his undergraduate and masters degrees in electrical engineering and PhD in mechanical and manufacturing engineering, all from the University of Melbourne. Area of research:

Robotics I am interested in how robots can use sensory information such as vision, force and touch to increase the breadth and reliability of tasks they do in our everyday world.   I am particularly interested in the sense of vision, and human hand-eye coordination is wonderful motivating example that highlights the stark difference between human and current robot capability.  Vision sensors and computing power are getting cheaper and cheaper, so now is the time to be doing vision for robotics! Some specific topics of interest include:

• The use of visual information for controlling robot motion, a technique known as visual servoing.
• Very wide field-of-view cameras based on fisheye lens and lens/mirror (catadioptric) optical systems.
• Optical flow, how images from a moving robot can be used to infer the world’s 3D structure and the robot’s motion
• Computer architectures for implementing computer vision algorithms in real time
• Stereo vision, using information from one or more cameras to create the 3D world structure.
• The combination arm and mobile robots to create mobile manipulation systems
• Vision processing within networks of cameras.
• Super-fast hand-eye coordination

Select keynote talks

• The International Symposium on Robotics Research, ISRR 2019 Hanoi Vietnam, 2019
• Emerging to Converging Technology, Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria (2019)
• Royal Australasian College of Physicians conference (RACP18), 2018
• Commonwealth Science Conference, Royal Society, Singapore, June 2017
• Canadian Robotic Vision Conference (CRV17), Edmonton, May 2017.
• MATLAB Expo, San Jose, Nov 2016
• Royal Society, London, Nov 2015
• Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, annual conference, Nov 2015;
• International Forum on Engineering Science and Technol- ogy Development Strategy: Intelligent Systems - Cities, Information, and Robots, Shenzen, China, April 2015
• IROS, Chicago, 2014.
• Int. Conf. Mechatronics and Automation (ICMA), China, August 2010.
• Public lecture on robotics at the 30th Oporto International Film Festival (FantasPorto), March 2010.
• 2nd International Symposium on Information and Robot Technology (ISIRT), Tokyo, March 2008.
• Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications, Canberra, December 2008.
• TTI/Vanguard  NextGens Technologies, Santa Monica, December 2007.
• Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR2007), Rome September 2007.

Advisory positions

• Technical advisory group: Australian Space Agency (2020-)
• Advisory board: Queensland Robotics Cluster; (2020-)
• Chief Scientist: Dorabot, Shenzhen, China (2019-)
• Scientific advisor: LYRO Robotics, Australia (2019-)
• Advisory board: The Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (A2I2), Deakin University, Australia (2019-)
• Advisory board: Khalifa University Center for Autonomous Robotic Systems, Abu Dhabi, UAE (2018-)
• Consultant: MathWorks Inc., Natick, MA, USA (2014-)

Awards and recognitions

• 2019: Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science
• 2017: Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, Australian University Teacher of the year.
• 2016: Eureka Prize Finalist (research and innovation in environmental science), COTSBot team.
• 2015: QS-Wharton: Engineering & IT award (gold); Teaching Delivery award (silver).
• 2015: Australian Office for Learning and Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.
• May 2009: Award in Research and Development for virtual fencing technology, Australian Information Industry Association, Queensland division
• 2008: Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences and Mathematics for Springer Handbook of Robotics, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers, Inc.
• June 2008: Finalist (one of five) for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Invention & Entrepreneurship Award (LHD project team)
• Dec 2007: Fellow of IEEE
• 2006: Australian Engineering Excellence award, Engineers Australia (Starbug project team)
• 2006: Innovation award, Engineers Australia, Queensland Engineering Excellence Awards (Starbug project team)
• 1999: Overseas Travel Fellowship, Australian Centre for Field Robotics
• 1996: Finalist (one of five) for the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions Paper Award, S. Hutchinson, G. Hager, and P. Corke, "A Tutorial on Visual Servo Control", IEEE Trans. on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 12, No. 5, Oct. 1996, pp. 651-670
• 1995: QANTAS Rolls-Royce Engineering Excellence Award (SafeTCam project team)
• 1994: The Honda Award for Best Technology Presentation at ISATA (Aachen).

Career history

• 2010-: Professor, QUT
• 2008: Transformational Capability Leader; Sensor Networks, CSIRO
• 2007 - 2008: Research theme leader; Sensor Networks, CSIRO
• 2004 - 2007: Research Director, Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Centre
• 2003: Senior Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Manufacturing and Infrastructure Technology
• 1995: Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Manufacturing Science and Technology
• 1990: Senior Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Manufacturing Technology
• 1989: Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Manufacturing Technology
• 1984: Experimental Scientist, CSIRO Division of Manufacturing Technology
• 1982 - 1983: Lecturer in control and computer architecture, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne.
• 1981:Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne. Also held visiting positions at
• 2009,12,13, 15: Mobile Robotics Group at Oxford University.
• 2003: Robotics Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University
• 1999: U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 1988-1989: the GRASP laboratory at U.Pennsylvania

Erdos number (3)

• Erdos -> Goldberg -> Camtepe -> Corke
• Erdos -> Subbarao -> Vidyasagar -> (Spong|Hutchinson) -> Corke
• Erdos -> Noga Alon -> Erik Demain -> Daniela Rus -> Corke

Web links

• Google Scholar profile
• QUT Robot Academy
• Australian Centre for Robotic Vision
• Peter on Wikipedia
• Visual servoing background
• Random famous roboticists