Robotics and Autonomous Systems
Overview
Robots and autonomous systems are changing the way we live, work and play. They’re used in industries like health, transport, manufacturing, agriculture, and even in energy and environmental sensing. Our work focuses on the development of technology that can be used to improve our understanding and management of the world around us, and that will benefit humanity.
Facilities
Australian Centre for Robotic Vision
Researchers from our discipline lead the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, headquartered at QUT, which is creating a new generation of robots that can understand their environment using the sense of vision, a missing capability preventing robots from performing useful tasks in complex and changing environments.
Research Engineering Facility (REF)
The Research Engineering Facility (REF) provides specialist, cross-organisational research engineering services and is hosted within the Institute for Future Environments (IFE).
REF has a proud history of providing services for both manned and unmanned aircraft, and supports QUT’s core strengths in robotics and autonomous systems through design, engineering and operations of airborne, terrestrial and marine robots.
Medical robotics facilities
Our researchers collaborate on multidisciplinary research at QUT’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI): a world-class facility dedicated to the prevention, intervention translation and technology to bridge the gap between research advances, health priorities and clinical practice.
Our researchers use QUT’s Medical Engineering Research Facility, located at the Prince Charles Hospital Campus in Brisbane.
Research
Our goal is to create robots that can operate in and interact with the world in the same complex ways as humans.
Our research has already led to the development of prototypes including:
- flying robots for large-scale infrastructure monitoring
- ground-based mobile robots for sustainable agricultural productivity
- crop harvesting robots
- on-water and underwater robots for environmental monitoring
- autonomous robots for optimised underground mining operations
- social and health-related applications for humanoid robots
- robots to help surgeons perform minimally invasive surgery.
Find out more about our research in robotics and autonomous systems
Featured research
Our researchers collaborate on projects in specialised research groups and facilities across disciplines and institutions:
- Digital Agriculture
- Quantitative Applied Spatial Ecology Group
- International laboratory for Air Quality and Health
Courses
Undergraduate
Our undergraduate engineering degrees offer a wide range of units dedicated to robotics and autonomous systems:
- Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) (Mechatronics)
- Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) (Electrical and Aerospace)
Online learning
We offer free open online courses (MOOCs) in robotics and robotic vision. These courses are open to everyone, and provide a platform for an introduction to robotics research.
The QUT Robot Academy is an online robotics education resource that offers you free access to undergraduate-level lessons, courses and masterclasses.
Projects
The Category 1 funded research projects we are currently leading are:
ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision
Project leader | Dates2014-2020 |
Project summary
Robots are vital to Australia's future prosperity in the face of high relative wages, low or decreasing productivity and impending labour shortages, however, the work and workplaces of our most important industries are unstructured and changeable, and current robots are challenged by their inability to quickly, safely and reliably "see" and "understand" what is around them.
Our research will create the fundamental science and technologies that will allow robots to "see" as we do, and overcome the last barrier to the ubiquitous deployment of robots into society for the benefit of all.
Find out more about the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision
ARC Future Fellowships
Navigating under the forest canopy and in the urban jungle
ARC Project
Project leader | Dates2018-2020 |
Project summary
This project aims to develop a framework for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), which optimally balances localisation, mapping and other objectives in order to solve sequential decision tasks under map and pose uncertainty.
Expected outcomes include enabling UAVs to solve multiple objectives under map and pose uncertainty in GPS-denied environments. This will provide significant benefits, such as more responsive disaster management, bushfire monitoring and biosecurity, and improved environmental monitoring.
Superhuman place recognition with a unified model of human visual processing and rodent spatial memory
ARC Project
Project leader | Dates2014-2018 |
Project summary
Current robotic and personal navigation systems leave much to be desired; GPS only works in open outdoor areas, lasers are expensive and cameras are highly sensitive to changing environmental conditions. In contrast, nature has evolved superb navigation systems.
This project aims to solve the challenging problem of place recognition, a key component of navigation, by modelling the visual recognition skills of humans and the rodent spatial memory system.
This project looks to combine the best understood and most capable components of place recognition in nature to create a whole more capable than its parts, produce advances in robotic and personal navigation technology and lead to breakthroughs in understandings of the brain.
Our experts
Our discipline brings together a diverse team of experts who deliver world-class education and achieve breakthroughs in research. We invite you to connect with our staff community.
Student topics
Are you looking to study at a higher or more detailed level? We are currently looking for students to research topics at a variety of study levels, including PhD, Masters, Honours or the Vacation Research Experience Scheme (VRES).
