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 46 matching student topics
Displaying 25–36 of 46 results
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
A soft robotic manipulator for spinal surgery
The geriatric population in Australia (4.2 million 2020, ABS), is growing steadily with numbers expected to double in the coming years. Incidences of spinal disorders requiring surgical treatment are therefore predicted to increase, incurring an estimated lifetime cost of AUD 3.7 billion per case (The Treasury). Robotics, an increasingly important component of modern medicine, is well suited to address the minimally invasive surgical needs of treating the spine.This project proposes the use of a soft-robotic manipulator to carry out spinal …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for 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
Human-Robot Collaboration
Study the dynamics and challenges of human-robot collaboration in the context of RPA and Business Process Automation. Explore ways to design collaborative interfaces, communication protocols, and decision-making frameworks that enable seamless interactions between human workers and automation robots (RPA), leading to efficient and effective task completion.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Information Systems
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for Behavioural Economics, Society and Technology
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
The use of chatbots for mental healthcare and emotional wellbeing
According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of disability, with 300 million globally suffering from it while fewer than half of those affected receive treatment. New Apps aim to help users manage their mental state, from meditation apps to more therapeutic platforms like Joyable. And a new Facebook Messenger chatbot called Woebot tries to help people with depression and other mental disorders through education and mood tracking. The focus of this research is to investigate consumers’ …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations
Semantic SLAM for robotic scene understanding, geometric-semantic representations for infrastructure monitoring and maintenance
Making a robot understand what it sees is one of the most fascinating goals in our current research. To this end, we develop novel methods for Semantic Mapping and Semantic SLAM by combining object detection with simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) techniques.We work on novel approaches to SLAM that create semantically meaningful maps by combining geometric and semantic information. Such semantically enriched maps will help robots understand our complex world and will ultimately increase the range and sophistication of interactions …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Optimisation of piezoelectric materials for robotics applications
Piezoelectricity, which translates to “pressure electricity”, is the phenomenon in which certain materials convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, and vice versa. Such materials are common-place and are used in a variety of applications including sensor, actuator, and energy harvesting technologies. The capabilities of such piezoelectric materials have not yet been fully realised. We plan to use computational structural optimisation to design new piezoelectric materials and components that may contribute to novel sensing technologies for robotics applications. Essentially, robots need …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
Robust feature selection and correspondence for visual control of robots
Stable correspondence-free image-based visual servoing is a challenging and important problem.In classical image-based visual controllers, explicit feature correspondence (matching) to some desired arrangement (configuration) is required before a control input is obtained. Instead, this project will investigate variable feature correspondence and robust feature selection to simultaneously solve visual servoing problem, removing any feature tracking requirement or additional image processing.Also involving Prof Jason Ford.Example of recent past work
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Increasing resilience of robotic systems through quickest change detection technology
Future robotics systems are likely to benefit from having an ability to self-diagnose self-failure or the presence of anomalous situations (so that they can switch to fallback or fail-safe modes). Example situations include subtle sensor or actuator failure and cyber security or physical intruder detection.Such low signal-to-noise anomaly detection or self-diagnose problems can be understood using powerful mathematical and statistical tools which QCR has a rich history of advancing through collaboration with industry partners and publication in premium international venues.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Perception-to-action for collision avoidance using robotic boats
Much like driving cars on our roads, there are rules around driving maritime systems (boats) on waterways regarding where you can drive and how to avoid and behave in potential collision situations.In this project, you'll explore and develop state-of-the-art perception and decision support solutions to allow robotic surface vessels (robot boats) to safely travel complex waterways in and around other human-driven vessels. This will involve diving deep into vision and laser-based sensor processing and fusion algorithms, as well as robust …
- 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
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