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 19 matching student topics
Displaying 1–12 of 19 results
See it without touching it: low-cost non-contact sensing for our waterways
Many of our most important waterbodies, including reservoirs, lakes, lagoons, wetlands, sedimentation basins, and constructed wetlands, are still monitored using sparse in-water sensors and periodic grab sampling. These methods are costly to maintain, hard to scale across many sites, and often miss spatially variable changes in water quality.Non-contact sensing offers a different approach. Cameras, spectral sensors, radar, thermal imaging, and other sensing modalities can observe water from outside it, reducing fouling, simplifying servicing, improving worker safety, and enabling broader spatial …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Rapid pathogen detection in water: from lab prototype to field-ready public health tool
Faecal contamination is one of the most consequential water hazards because it directly affects public health. Beach closures, do-not-drink advisories, and waterway warnings all depend on detecting microbial contamination quickly and reliably. Today, monitoring still depends largely on infrequent sampling and laboratory turnaround times that arrive long after the contamination has come and gone.Direct microbial sensing has advanced through biosensors and microfluidics, but most concepts remain at low technology readiness and are rarely demonstrated as field-usable systems. Reliability in the …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
A sense of touch for robots
Touch, or awareness of contact, is one of the key challenges in robotics, particularly in the soft and highly deformable environment of the human body. This project will explore the development and use of interferometric filters to quantify contact pressures through spectral changes in reflected light. Thus a quantitative 'image' of force may be created to both characterise and guide robot-tissue interactions.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Dual mode ultrasonics
This project develops a new approach to ultrasonic sensing, sending and receiving high frequency acoustic pulses from a low frequency platform to modulate spectral content and microscale spatial offsets. In doing so, it will give surgical robotics platforms access to the rich array of physical information in acoustic pulses, which can be used to characterise tissues encountered during surgery and guide the robot in the intervention itself.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
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
Understanding responsible deployment of computer vision for urban planning
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer urban planning practice many novel prospects. By the responsive use of AI, planners can effectively analyse data, improve processes, increase efficiency, and prioritise human-centric aspects of planning to develop sustainable cities. Computer vision is one of the key areas where responsible AI is applied in urban planning to revolutionise the analysis and interpretation of visual data, like images and videos captured in cities to aid decision and plan making processes. While the potential impacts …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Architecture and Built Environment
Smart sensing for nutrients in our waterways: low-cost continuous monitoring for pollution tracking and real-time control
Nitrogen and phosphorus are central to the health of stormwater systems, rivers, wetlands, and lakes. They drive algal growth, oxygen stress, and downstream ecological impacts, and they are a key input to environmental reporting and catchment management. Yet most monitoring still relies on infrequent grab samples that miss the short pollution pulses that matter most.The challenge is delivering nutrient monitoring that is affordable, low-maintenance, and reliable enough for continuous deployment across many sites. Existing nutrient sensors are often too expensive …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Quantifying sedimentation on reefs using Google Earth Engine
Decreasing water quality is negativtly impacting coral reefs globally and is a threat that can be actively managed.
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for the Environment
Drone and satellite Artificial Intelligence
Satellite and drone/UAV data has a great potential to provide large-scale analytics for many domain applications. However, the wide range of data of diverse nature (e.g., optical vs. SAR, high-resolution vs. wide-coverage, mono- vs. hyper-spectral, 2-D vs. 3-D) also poses significant challenges for analytics.Deep learning holds great promise to deal with these tasks. While the number of research in this area is increasing, there still exists challenges such as co-learning of multimodal data, limited data annotation, and uncertainty in the …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Assessing reef restoration using MARRS Reef Stars on the Great Barrier Reef
The Bait Reef rehabilitation project commenced in early 2021 (site surveys, risk assessments and approval processes) and installation on-site occurred in October 2021. Since installation there has been monitoring of the Reef Stars in June 2022, February 2023, and January 2024.Thermal bleaching impacts in early 2022 and rapid colonisation of the area by soft corals meant that by February 2022 more than 50% of the original coral fragments had died. Subsequently, in August 2023 all dead fragments (still attached to …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Assessing the quality of cluster analysis
Machine learning cluster methods are common classification methods, but methods for assessing performance are limited as are methods for explaining how they work. Exploring methods for both assessing and explaining performance are the subject of this research with application to real-world contexts with the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Assessing coral rubble restoration on the Great Barrier Reef
Coral reefs face cumulative threats from climate change to shipping and the concern is that this can cause reefs to transition from coral to rubble dominated states. The formation of coral rubble is a natural part of the reef cycle, however, too much rubble can decrease the resilience of reefs and prevent recovery. A number of coral rubble stabilisation methods are being utilised globally including Mars Assisted Reef Restoration System of hexagonal metal units that are deployed on reefs with …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for the Environment
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