Vacation Research Experience Scheme student topics

Many goods are packaged in sheets of paper. Automating this task with a robot is difficult for two reasons. One is that picking up and manipulating thin flexible sheets is difficult with existing grippers. Second, a careful coordination of both hands is required to delicately handle both the project being handled and the packaging material. The goal of this project is to develop a prototype gripper that uses electrostatic attraction to manipulate objects.

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Research centre

Centre for Robotics

At the QUT centre for robotics, we develop new types of tactile sensors for robots, grippers and medical applications. The most common way of using tactile sensors is to stick them on to a hard surface. Recent studies in the lab have shown that this may not be the best way to make use of sensors, and that to make them useful in robot hands, the stiffness of the surface on which the sensor is built, must be carefully tuned. …

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Research centre

Centre for Robotics

Are you curious about how the Earth’s most remote oceans shape our climate?The Southern Ocean and Antarctic regions are among the fastest-changing and least-understood parts of the planet. A key reason climate models struggle to simulate clouds in the Southern Ocean is a misrepresentation of aerosols, which are tiny particles that seed cloud formation and modulate Earth’s energy balance. Understanding where these particles come from, how they are transformed, and how they link to the broader atmospheric system is essential …

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Research centre

Centre for Environment and Society

Have you ever wondered how the ocean makes clouds? The oceans are a major source of cloud-forming particles through the emission of sea spray, which is particulate sea salt mixed with organic matter, into the atmosphere. Yet we still don't fully understand how oceanic conditions (temperature, salinity, biological activity) control the size and concentration of these particles, and therefore their effect on climate. During the Multidisciplinary Investigations of the Southern Ocean (MISO) voyage to Antarctica, a sea spray generation chamber …

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Research centre

Centre for Environment and Society

Beam theory is an approximation of continuum mechanics to estimate stresses and strains in the midshaft of a long beam. Beam theory is traditionally formulated for homogenous materials of constant elasticity. It has been extended to layered materials composed of several materials, but some aspects of layered beams do not apply to porous materials, where the porous phase is essentially not load bearing.In this project, you will extend beam theory to porous materials with nonuniform porosity, and explore the effect …

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Biological tissues such as epithelia are composed of many adjacent cells that interact with each other mechanically, and that may proliferate, die, and move around. Our group is developing discrete and continuum mathematical frameworks to model these types of tissues and investigate the strong interplay between tissue geometry, tissue mechanics, and cell biology in many experimental situations, including tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, bone formation, tumour growth, and wound healing. Several important generalisations of these existing models and their link …

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Biofilms are a biological material formed by a mixture of bacteria embedded in the extracellular matrix that they produce. Biofilm growth can be fast and vary widely depending on the type of bacteria used and substrate on which the biofilm grows. There is growing interest in being able to control properties of biofilms for bioengineering applications. Recent experiments show that buckling-induced folds of biofilms growing on corrugated substrates occur preferentially at peaks of the interface rather than at its troughs.This …

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Reaction–diffusion waves in multiple spatial dimensions advance at a rate that strongly depends on the curvature of the wavefronts. These waves have important applications in many physical, ecological and biological systems. Our group has recently provided new theoretical and numerical analyses to elucidate the influence of curvature for the diffusion and reaction of entities, such as chemical compounds, biological cells, or individuals in a population.In this project, you will extend these mathematical and/or numerical analyses to new situations, such as …

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Large-scale object detection and segmentation datasets (COCO, Open Images, Waymo) depend on crowdsourced annotations from multiple annotators, inevitably introducing labeling inconsistencies. These inconsistencies—missing annotations, bounding box misalignments, segmentation boundary errors, and class confusion—inject noise that degrades downstream model performance. While manual review could identify such errors, it scales poorly across millions of annotations. Current datasets lack systematic methods to automatically evaluate and detect labeling quality issues, and standard model training can unknowingly absorb and perpetuate label noise rather than flag …

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Bone is a dynamic tissue that optimises its shape to the mechanical loads that it carries. Bone mass is accrued where loads are high, and reduced where loads are low. This adaptation of bone tissue to mechanical loads is due to a network of cells living within bone tissues, the osteocyte network. The osteocyte network senses mechanical deformations and emits signals that propagate to the bone surface to induce bone formation or bone removal.In this project, you will develop new …

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Bone tissue contains a dense network of cells called osteocytes. The osteocyte network in bone is a built-in mechanical processing unit that controls when and where bone needs to be added, replaced, mineralised, or removed throughout our life. There is still much uncertainty about how the architecture of the osteocyte network is generated and how it achieves regulatory control of bone.In this project, you will develop new image analysis tools tailored to the osteocyte network to analyse how it grows, …

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

This project aims to generate new knowledge about victimisation pathways into forced criminality. It focuses on how people describe becoming involved in exploitative or scam-related situations, including who is victimised, who appears to be at higher risk and when and where victimisation takes place.The core research problem is that forced criminality is often difficult to detect until harm has already occurred. Existing research tells us that people can be drawn into criminal exploitation through deception, pressure or coercion, but less …

Faculty

Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice

School

School of Justice

Research centre

Centre for Justice