QUT offers a diverse range of student topics for Honours, Masters and PhD study. Search to find a topic that interests you or propose your own research topic to a prospective QUT supervisor. You may also ask a prospective supervisor to help you identify or refine a research topic.
Found 431 matching student topics
Displaying 1–12 of 431 results
Leading diversity
Diversity is a buzz word in many organizations today. While having a diverse team promise potential for innovation and creativity, it can also create many challenges. Leading diversity will be an important capability for future leaders.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Management
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Future Enterprise
Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research
Submarine manipulation
This project will explore and develop techniques for control and vision in submarines to allow for robust and effective manipulation capabilities - autonomous control of an underwater mobile manipulator in the presence of current and reactionary forces.Underwater maintenance: A submarine mobile manipulator can carry out underwater maintenance and monitoring, for example, dam wall maintenance or ship hull cleaning.Coral reef: A submarine mobile manipulator which can collect samples, remove rubbish, remove invasive species, and/or monitor.Alternatively, these same underlying ideas could be …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Space robotics: Scene understanding for Lunar/Mars Rover
The QUT Centre for Robotics is working with the Australian Space Agency on the newly established Australian space program, in which robots will play a key role. There are multiple PhD projects available to work on different aspect of developing a new Lunar Rover (and later Mars Rover) and in particular its intelligence and autonomy. Future rovers will not only need to conduct exploration and science missions as famous rovers such as NASA's Curiosity or Perseverance are doing right now …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Implicit representations for place recognition and robot localisation
This project will develop a novel localization pipeline based on implicit map representations. Unlike traditional approaches that use explicit representations like point clouds or voxel grids, the map in our project is represented implicitly in the weights of neural networks such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). You will get a chance to develop a new class of localization algorithms that work directly on the implicit representation, bypassing the costly rendering step from implicit to explicit representation. The designed algorithms will …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Very high-speed dynamic motion planning for arm robots
Robot manipulator arms are increasingly used for logistics applications. These typically require robots to run at the limits of their performance: motor torque and motor velocity. Added challenges include significant payloads (if we are schlepping heavy parcels) with apriori unknown mass, the possibility of boxes detaching from the gripper under high acceleration, and fixed obstacles in the workspace. How can we determine the limits to performance, quickly identify the payload mass, then plan the fastest path to get from A to B.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
High-speed robotic waste separation
Sorting waste or recyclables is an important but unpleasant job, currently done by specialised machinery and humans for the hard bits. What are the core challenges that could be done by "robots that see". This is a challenging problem in perception, dynamic path planning and control.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Outdoor litter collection
Cleanup Australia day in 2019 collected 17,000 ute loads of rubbish from rivers, parks, beaches, roadways and bushland. Imagine a robot ground vehicle or boat that could identify litter, plan the motion of the robot so that it can pick up items in the right sequence so that it doesn't have to stop, while also navigating obstacles in the environment. This is a challenging problem in perception, dynamic path planning and control.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Robotic maintenance of equipment
Think about the problem of maintaining equipment at remote work sites. How can robotic technology help human maintenance staff to work more safely and productively?
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Cobot contact tasks through multi-sensory deep learning
Contact tasks like grinding, polishing and assembly require a robot to physically interact with both rigid and flexible objects. Current methods relying on force control have difficulty achieving consistent finishing results and lack robustness in dealing with non-linear dynamics inherent in how the material is handled. This project will take a new approach that detects and diagnoses the dynamical process through deep learning fusion of multi-sensory data, including force/tactile, visual, thermal, sound, and acoustic emission; and generate corrective process parameters …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Off-road mobile manipulation
This project will investigate how mobile manipulators can operate and interact in natural environments like rainforests, grassland, shrubland, farmland, or desert ecosystems. This research project would explore how to control a continuous track or quadruped mobile manipulator in outdoor natural environments with many obstacles and constraints.Is holistic mobile manipulation possible with uneven terrain? As a mobile robot traverses rough ground, the terrain difference will cause feedback in the end-effector position.The mobile manipulator must overcome obstacle challenges, i.e. traverse around a …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Manipulation in nature
Grasping/manipulating in rainforest, farmland or shrubland environments pose a new challenge for existing techniques. This project will investigate how they manipulate where there may be tree branches, foliage, or other natural obstacles in the way.This project would explore existing and emerging techniques such as optimisation, neural radiance fields (NeRFs), deep learning and reinforcement learning and equipment, including depth cameras, LiDAR, event cameras, and light field cameras.Does the manipulator have to re-arrange the environment to manipulate the point of interest?Or does …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Mobile manipulation with logistics
Mobile manipulators have been proven helpful for individual manipulation tasks but slow for larger-scale logistical tasks. This project investigates how several robots (mobile manipulators and mobile robots) can cooperate to complete a task efficiently (this could be considered a travelling salesman problem with moving depots).Agriculture: The mobile manipulator picks the produce while the mobile robots transfer to produce between collection points.Clean up Australia Day 2019: Collecting rubbish from natural environments. Mobile manipulators collect rubbish and transfer it to mobile robots, …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Contact us
If you have questions about the best options for you, the application process, your research topic, finding a supervisor or anything else, get in touch with us today.