Distinguished Professor
Peter Corke

Faculty of Engineering,
School of Electrical Engineering & Robotics
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
- 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.
- 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-)
- 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).
- 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 -> Goldberg -> Camtepe -> Corke
- Erdos -> Subbarao -> Vidyasagar -> (Spong|Hutchinson) -> Corke
- Erdos -> Noga Alon -> Erik Demain -> Daniela Rus -> Corke
Personal details
Positions
- Professor of Robotic Vision
Faculty of Engineering,
School of Electrical Engineering & Robotics
Keywords
Robotic vision, Robotics, Computer Vision, Dynamics & Control, Environmental Monitoring
Discipline
Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field of Research code, Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC), 2008
Qualifications
- PhD (The University of Melbourne)
Professional memberships and associations
- Director of ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision
- Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA)
- Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (FTSE)
- Fellow of the IEEE (FIEEE)
- Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK (SFHEA)
- Member of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
- Officer of the International Federation of Robotics Research (IFRR).
Teaching
- EGB439: Advanced Robotics (2013, 2016-20)
- EGB339: Introduction to Robotics (2011, 2012, 2014, 2021)
- EGB458: Advanced control (2012)
- QUT Robot Academy, open online video lessons
Experience
I have been "doing robotics" for 35 years. 25 of those years were at CSIRO working on applied R&D projects in the manufacturing, mining, asset management and agricultural domains. Some projects from my career include:
- Robots for logistics handling on a space station
- Scout vehicles for detecting weeds in pastures
- Autononomous vehicles for weed spraying in broad-acre agriculture
- Very large robotic systems for excavation in open-pit mines (automated draglines)
- Autonomous trucks for ore haulage in underground hard rock mines
- Small-scale aerial robots, including gas powered helicopters and electric quad-rotors
- Underwater robots for environmental monitoring
In the area of computer vision I have been involved in projects such as:
- Networks of cameras to monitor hand hygiene in hospitals
- Use of very wide angle cameras for robot navigation
- Very high speed stereo vision
- High-speed food sorting
- SafeTCam traffic monitoring system seen on NSW highways.
In the area of wireless sensor networks:
- Mobile sensors to monitor and control livestock
- Large scale environmental monitoring
- The combination with robotics to create mobile sensing systems
- Vision processing in sensor networks.
- Embedded operating systems, programming methodologies, in-network processing, large-scale network management, robust routing, and security.
External collaborations
- Mobile Robotics Group, Oxford University
- Distributed Robotics Lab, MIT
- IRISA/INRA, Rennes.
Research interests
- Wireless sensor networks and applications
- Robotics and sensor networks for environmental management
- Aerial robots
- Robotics; control architectures, sensor-based control
- Machine vision; stereo, algorithms, video-rate processing
- Real-time distributed computer applications.
Scientific community service
- Editor-in-chief of the IEEE Robotics & Automation magazine (2009-2013)
- Founding and associate editor of the Journal of Field Robotics
- Founding multi-media editor and editorial board member of the International Journal of Robotics Research
- Member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts on Advanced Robotics series
- Member of external advisory board for CONET, EU research network on cooperating objects
- Past president of the Australian Robotics and Automation Association
- Region chair, area chair, member of technical committees for major international conferences such as: ICRA, IROS, RSS, Sensys, IPSN.
Selected publications
- Suenderhauf N, Dayoub F, Hall D, Skinner J, Zhang H, Carneiro G, Corke P, (2019) A probabilistic challenge for object detection, Nature Machine Intelligence, 1 (9).
- Morrison D, Corke P, Leitner J, (2018) Closing the loop for robotic grasping: A real-time, generative grasp synthesis approach, Robotics: Science and Systems XIV, pp. 1-10.
- Morrison D, Tow A, Mctaggart M, Smith R, Kelly - Boxall N, Wade-Mccue S, Erskine J, Grinover R, Gurman A, Hunn T, Lee D, Milan A, Pham T, Rallos G, Razjigaev A, Rowntree T, Kumar V, Zhuang Z, Lehnert C, Reid I, Corke P, Leitner J, (2018) Cartman: The low-cost Cartesian manipulator that won the Amazon Robotics Challenge, Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 7757-7764.
- Tsai D, Dansereau D, Peynot T, Corke P, (2017) Image-based visual servoing with light field cameras, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2 (2), pp. 912-919.
- Mcfadyen A, Jabeur M, Corke P, (2017) Image-based visual servoing with unknown point feature correspondence, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2 (2), pp. 601-607.
- Pepperell E, Corke P, Milford M, (2016) Routed roads: Probabilistic vision-based place recognition for changing conditions, split streets and varied viewpoints, International Journal of Robotics Research, 35 (9), pp. 1057-1179.
- Lowry S, Suenderhauf N, Newman P, Leonard J, Cox D, Corke P, Milford M, (2016) Visual place recognition: A survey, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 32 (1), pp. 1-19.
- Zhang F, Leitner J, Milford M, Upcroft B, Corke P, (2015) Towards vision-based deep reinforcement learning for robotic motion control, Proceedings of the Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation 2015, pp. 1-8.
- Corke P, Paul R, Churchill W, Newman P, (2013) Dealing with shadows: Capturing intrinsic scene appearance for image-based outdoor localisation, Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 2085-2092.
- Mahony R, Kumar V, Corke P, (2012) Multirotor aerial vehicles: Modeling, estimation, and control of quadrotor, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, 19 (3), pp. 20-32.
QUT ePrints
For more publications by Peter, explore their research in QUT ePrints (our digital repository).
Awards
- Type
- Editorial Role for an Academic Journal
- Reference year
- 2016
- Details
- Editor-in-chief of IEEE Robotics and Automation magazine 2009-13
- Type
- Fellowships
- Reference year
- 2007
- Details
- Fellow of IEEE
- Type
- Editorial Role for an Academic Journal
- Reference year
- 2006
- Details
- Founding editor and current associate editor
- Type
- Editorial Role for an Academic Journal
- Reference year
- 2004
- Details
- Member of editorial board, special responsibility for multi-media content, since 2000.
Research projects
- Title
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision (ACRV)
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- CE140100016
- Start year
- 2014
- Keywords
- Robotic Vision; Robotics; Computer Vision
- Title
- Human Cues for Robot Navigation
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- DP140103216
- Start year
- 2014
- Keywords
- Autonomous Robots; Mapping and Navigation; Spatial Cognition
- Title
- Robotics for zero-tillage agriculture
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- LP110200375
- Start year
- 2012
- Keywords
- Robotics; Broad Acre Agriculture; Zero Tillage; Weed Control
- Title
- Lifelong Robotic Navigation Using Visual Perception
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- DP110103006
- Start year
- 2011
- Keywords
- Robotics; Computer Vision; Visual Mapping; Visual Navigation
Supervision
Completed supervisions (Doctorate)
- Continuous Appearance-Based Localisation and Mapping (2014)
- Developing Grounded Representations for Robots through the Principles of Sensorimotor Coordination (2014)
- Development of Gas Sensing Technology for Ground and Airborne Applications Powered by Solar Energy: Methodology and Experimental Results (2014)
- Joint 2D and 3D Cues for Image Segmentation Towards Robotic Applications (2014)
- Shared Autonomy for Close-Quarters Navigation and Control of a VTOL Platform (2014)
- Wide-Baseline Keypoint Detection and Matching with Wide-Angle Images for Vision Based Localisation (2010)
Completed supervisions (Masters by Research)
- Design, Modelling and Measurement of Hybrid Powerplant for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) (2013)
- BabelFuse Data Fusion Unit with Precision Wireless Clock Synchronisation (2012)
- Non-Invasive Method for Detecting Changes in Soil Moisture Using Wireless Sensor Network (2012)
- Statistical Modelling of Wind Effects on Signal Propagation for Wireless Sensor Networks (2011)